Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favourite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, and one of the few women accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In accounts of her role as an artist, she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified as monstrously unfeminine. In this work, Mary D. Sheriff uses Vigee-Lebrun's career to explore the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional and medical debates about women in 18th-century France. Paying particular attention to painted and textual...
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favourite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, and one of the few women accepte...