Portrait of a Woman by Bridget Quinn

Author:Bridget Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC

There had, of course, been plenty of self-promoting self-portraits by artists in the past. Albrecht Dürer’s Christlike visage springs immediately to mind. Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura). Rembrandt van Rijn’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles. And, of course, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s recent Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, where she aligned herself with Peter Paul Rubens, and by extension other old masters. Adélaïde had clearly taken note, but she went further. She claimed her own place in a lineage of masters and brought other women with her. Hers is the first known self-portrait of a woman artist at work alongside her students.

Like Élisabeth, Adélaïde depicts herself in a straw hat adorned with an emphatic ostrich feather flourish, though on Adélaïde it looks weirder because she is clearly indoors. And while Élisabeth wields a charged palette beneath her sunlit visage like some bountiful nature goddess—La Primavera as La Pittura—Adélaïde’s vision is somehow stranger for existing in an enclosed everyday space, under brown studio light.

Her scene is a kind of stage set, no less than that of the Horatii. But rather than antique tragedy, Adélaïde enacts a domestic drama where she herself is center stage, spotlighted, and in control, director and actor both. We are her audience. Like Jacques-Louis David, she has a tale to tell, a point to make. Because in addition to needing to drum up sales, she must save her artistic legacy from the danger that threatens it before it’s fully begun.

On May 14, 1783, two weeks before she and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun were elected to the Académie Royal, the comte d’Angiviller, a kind of minister of culture, had predicted their inclusion. He was willing to concede the battle, but he also sought to win the war. As discussed in Chapter 13, the Académie maintained a tacit quota of four women in its esteemed ranks at any time, but without royal endorsement, this quota never carried the force of official law. When the comte d’Angiviller saw the writing on the wall—that is, that royal influence would insist on, at the very least, Vigée-Lebrun’s election to the Académie—he wrote King Louis XVI to strongly suggest a royal decree that would codify the quota of four women in law. “This number,” he wrote, “is sufficient to honor their talent.”36

In practice this meant that none of Adélaïde’s noteworthy students (more on them to come) could hope to enter the Académie Royale until one of the current four women died. A grim prospect. And not great for friendship and support among women artists. Not to mention the implied tokenism of the four women already in the Académie Royal, whose work could never be “useful to the progress of the arts.” Another way of saying, really, that while women’s art might aspire to be good, it could never be great.

Adélaïde, who had sought assistance from the very same comte d’Angiviller, via his wife, in combatting libelous verses at the 1783 Salon, now mounted her own defense. Like all scrappy ballers, she went on offense.

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