The Exceptional Woman

Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art

Author: Mary D. Sheriff

A court-painter to Marie Antoinette, Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrun was rediscovered in the 1970s as part of the "hidden feminist heritage". This text uses her career to explore the position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional and medical debates about women in 18th-century France.

Product Unavailable

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

Description

Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favorite 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 The Exceptional Woman, Mary D. Sheriff uses Vigée-Lebrun's career to explore the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional, and medical debates about women in eighteenth-century France. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigée-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women.

Engaging ancien-régime philosophy, as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vigée-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work and the world of this controversial woman artist.

About the Author

Mary D. Sheriff (1950-2016) was the W. R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art and department chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her scholarship focused on 18th- and 19th-century French art and culture.