Eighteenth Century Women Artists

The eighteenth century was an age when not only the aristocracy but a burgeoning middle class could enjoy a remarkable flowering of the arts. But it was a man's world; any woman who wished to succeed as an artist had to overcome numerous obstacles. In a society in which women were required to marry, reproduce, and conform to rigid social conventions a professional artist risked becoming an object of gossip and hostility. Nevertheless, for a woman who had charm and good looks, was ambitious, and allied talent with hard work, success was attainable. This book examines the careers and working lives of celebrated artists like Angelica Kauffman and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun but also of those who are now forgotten. As well as assessing the work itself - from history and genre painting to portraits - it considers artists' studios, the functioning of the print market, how art was sold, the role of patrons and the flourishing world of the lady amateur. It is enriched by up to 55 illustrations in glorious colour.

The eighteenth century is recognized as a complex period of dramatic epistemic shifts that would have profound effects on the modern world. Paradoxically, the art of the era continues to be a relatively neglected field within art history. While women's private lives, their involvement with cultural production, the project of Enlightenment, and the public sphere have been the subjects of ground-breaking historical and literary studies in recent decades, women's engagement with the arts remains one of the richest and most under-explored areas for scholarly investigation. This collection of new essays by specialist authors addresses women's activities as patrons and as "patronized" artists over the course of the century. It provides a much needed examination, with admirable breadth and variety, of women's artistic production and patronage during the eighteenth century. By opening up the specific problems and conflicts inherent in women's artistic involvements from the perspective of what was at stake for the eighteenth-century women themselves, it also acts as a corrective to the generalizing and stereotyping about the prominence of those women, which is too often present in current day literature. Some essays are concerned with how women's involvement in the arts allowed them to fashion identities for themselves (whether national, political, religious, intellectual, artistic, or gender-based) and how such self-fashioning in turn enabled them to negotiate or intervene in the public domains of culture and politics where "The Woman Question" was so hotly debated. Other essays examine how men's patronage of women also served as a vehicle for self-fashioning for both artist and sponsor. Artists and patrons discussed include: Carriera; Queen Lovisa Ulrike and Chardin; the Bourbon Princesses Mlle Clermont, Mme Adélaïde and Nattier; the Duchess of Osuna and Goya; Marie-Antoinette and Vigée-Lebrun; Labille-Guiard; Queen Carolina of Naples, Prince Stanislaus Poniatowski of Poland and Kauffman; David and his students, Mesdames Benoist, Lavoisier and Mongez.

A major task confronting today's scholars is the reclamation from near oblivion of a multitude of works of art, literature, music, scholarship, and other creative enterprises by eighteenth-century women. This fascinating collection provides a multifaceted approach to understanding the roles played by women as both creators of and subjects within works of art in the eighteenth century. A series of initial essays examines the biographical and historical conditions in which women of the times lived and worked. Some essays explore the attitudes of women themselves and how they perceived their roles, as well as their expectations expressed by male authors. Other essays focus on women's contributions to particular arts, notably poetry, the novel, music, and painting. A final section attends to research itself, reporting first on collaborative efforts to identify individual eighteenth-century women authors and discover trends in their writing. In addition, an alternative to the traditional scholarly methods course is provided in an example of the original research directed toward the rediscovery and understanding of the texts of Elizabeth Griffeth. This entertaining collection will foster new appreciation for the presence of women in the arts of the eighteenth century. An important contribution to women's studies, this volume is sure to be of special interest to students and scholars alike.

Through both longer essays and shorter case studies, this book examines the relationship of European women from various countries and backgrounds to collecting, in order to explore the social practices and material and visual cultures of collecting in eighteenth-century Europe. It recovers their lives and examines their interests, their methodologies, and their collections and objects—some of which have rarely been studied before. The book also considers women’s role as producers, that is, creators of objects that were collected. Detailed examination of the artefacts—both visually, and in relation to their historical contexts—exposes new ways of thinking about collecting in relation to the arts and sciences in eighteenth-century Europe. The book is interdisciplinary in its makeup and brings together scholars from a wide range of fields. It will be of interest to those working in art history, material and visual culture, history of collecting, history of science, literary studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and art conservation.

Focusing on the visual arts and written texts, this book explores the nature of femininity and masculinity in 18th-century Britain and France. The activities and collective conditions of women as producers of art and culture are investigated, together with analysis of representation and the ways in which it might be gendered. This illustrated book should make an important contribution to debates on representation, constructions of sexuality and women as producers.

Presents an introduction to a variety of Canadian women artists, from the 1800s to the present day.

Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women – the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home. Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families. In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity. Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images.

In eighteenth-century France, the ability to lose oneself in a character or scene marked both great artists and ideal spectators. Yet it was thought this same passionate enthusiasm, if taken to unreasonable extremes, could also lead to sexual deviance, mental illness—even death. Women and artists were seen as especially susceptible to these negative consequences of creative enthusiasm, and women artists, doubly so. Mary D. Sheriff uses these very different visions of enthusiasm to explore the complex interrelationships among creativity, sexuality, the body and the mind in eighteenth-century France. Drawing on evidence from the visual arts, literature, philosophy, and medicine, she portrays the deviance ascribed to both inspired men and women. But while various mythologies worked to normalize deviance in male artists, women had no justification for their deviance. For instance, the mythical sculptor Pygmalion was cured of an abnormal love for his statue through the making of art. He became a model for creative artists, living happily with his statue come to life. No happy endings, though, were imagined for such inspired women writers as Sappho and Heloise, who burned with erotomania their art could not quench. Even so, Sheriff demonstrates, the perceived connections among sexuality, creativity, and disease also opened artistic opportunities for creative women took full advantage of them. Brilliantly reassessing the links between sexuality and creativity, artistic genius and madness, passion and reason, Moved by Love will profoundly reshape our view of eighteenth- century French culture.