Eighteenth-Century Women Artists by Caroline Chapman

Author:Caroline Chapman [Caroline Chapman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910787502
Publisher: Unicorn Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Bachaumont, however, qualifies his praise by pointing out that her celebrity was aided by her youth, appearance, powerful contacts and elegant entertainments.28

The greatest advantage of membership of the Académie was that it enabled artists to exhibit in the annual Salons, the supreme marketplace. The majority of women artists, however, had to rely on alternative institutions to display their work, such as the Salon de la Correspondance in Paris and other exhibiting societies which grew up to cater for the growing number of artists and spectators. (Membership of the Académie Royale did not, however, allow women to compete for the coveted Prix de Rome.)

In 1791 fresh attempts were made to persuade the Académie Royale to admit more than four women members. The response from Louis XVI’s imperious arts minister, Comte d’Angiviller, was unequivocal: ‘this number is adequate to honour talent: women can never be useful to the progress of the arts since the modesty of their sex prevents them from studying nude figures in the school established by Your Majesty.’29 Since being unable to draw from life had nothing to do with women’s modesty but everything to do with the Académie forbidding women to attend its schools, this was a wonderfully Catch-22 answer.

If the Académie Royale’s attitude to women artists appeared unjust, admitting four women was double that of London’s Royal Academy, which had elected Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser as founder members in 1768 but declined to elect another (Dame Laura Knight) until 1936, 168 years later.

31. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Augustin Pajou, 1782

This painting, submitted by the artist as her reception piece for the Académie Royale is, in effect, a double portrait as it shows not only the sculptor Pajou but his teacher Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne. Both Labille-Guiard and Vigée Le Brun were accepted for membership on the same day, encouraging the perception that they were rivals.

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