Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves

Sisters are doin’ it for themselves.
Standin’ on their own two feet.
And ringin’ on their own bells.
Sisters are doin’ it for themselves.
Now this is a song to celebrate
The conscious liberation of the female state!
Mothers, daughters, and their daughters too.
Woman to woman
We’re singin’ with you.
The inferior sex got a new exterior
We got doctors, lawyers, politicians, too.
Everybody, take a look around.
Can you see, can you see, can you see,
There’s a woman right next to you.

—From “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” by Aretha Franklin and the Eurythmics

Women artists have always struggled to find a place in the male-dominated world of art, just a tiny slice of the larger patriarchy of history. One of the first places and eras in which women artists could assert themselves was late eighteenth-century France. Adelaide Labille-Guiard was one of the first great women artists of that time. Born April 11, 1749, Labille-Guiard began as most women artists did—as a miniaturist and pastel artist, the two genres deemed “acceptable” for their gender. Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait of a Miniaturist (above, from 1775) shows her as she saw herself at the point in her career—as a miniaturist who thinks bigger. Studying pastels with Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Labille-Guiard soon excelled at reproducing textures and faces, the two skills that would lead to a profitable career in portraiture later on. She studied oil painting under François-Elie Vincent and eventually opened up her own school after leaving her husband in 1777, just two years after painting her self-portrait as a miniaturist. Labille-Guiard’s world was about to get a whole lot bigger.

In 1783, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture of France admitted Labille-Guiard, Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, and two other women artists. Strictures were placed upon the number of women who could be admitted and their work was never compared with that of the male members, but it was still a big step toward acceptance for these women. Labille-Guiard and Vigee-Le Brun thus began an artistic “rivalry” that continues even today. As much as people love the idea of artists locked in some kind of combat, commercial or ideological, I’d like to think that there was at least some sense of sisterhood between these two great women artists as they simultaneously broke barriers. Vigee-Le Brun, however, does seem more of a loner than Labille-Guiard. While Vigee-Le Brun courted Marie Antoinette and other prominent members of society, Labille-Guiard fostered relationships with the next generation of women artists. Self-Portrait With Two Pupils (above, from 1785) shows Labille-Guiard with Marie-Gabrielle Capet and Carreaux de Rosemond, two of her star students. No longer the meek miniaturist, Labille-Guiard paints herself in grand style surrounded by her favorite students, the legacy she hoped to leave behind.


Ironically, the success of Self-Portrait With Two Pupils gained Labille-Guiard access to the court of Louis XVI via his aunt, the princess Marie Adélaïde. Labille-Guiard soon won a government pension, and commissions to paint the princess, her sister Victoire-Louise, and Élisabeth, Louis XIV's sister. Although she frequented this royal company, Labille-Guiard remained a revolutionary at heart, which helped her survive the violence of the French Revolution. She even found lasting love and married her old teacher Vincent. Labille-Guiard’s focus, however, always remained on the cause of women in the arts. The portrait of Marie-Gabrielle Capet (above), one of the two pupils in Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait With Two Pupils, shows the student dressed as a successful artist in her own right. It’s truly a shame that art history has treated Labille-Guiard as a lesser version of Vigee-Le Brun, as if only one great woman artist could be accepted at a time. Today, Labille-Guiard’s reputation has been resurrected by women artists looking for the ancestors who took those first difficult steps on the road to equality.

Revolutionary Woman

With her acceptance into the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1783 with three other women, including her closest female competitor, Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Adelaide Labille-Guiard could have been content that she had finally found a place in the French art world and the “old boy” network of the Paris Salon. However, Labille-Guiard, born April 11, 1749, was not satisfied. Two years later, her Self-Portrait with Two Pupils (above, from 1785) announced that she was a force to be reckoned with, regardless of gender. Surrounded by her pupils Marie Capet and Carreaux de Rosemond, Labille-Guiard not only looks the viewer confidently in the eye as she plies her painting trade, but she also shows herself dressed in the finery purchased with the wealth that her skills had earned. During her lifetime, Labille-Guiard often took second place behind Vigee-Le Brun, but today they’re seen as equals, both fighting for the same right of expression in royalist France.

Like most women artists of the eighteenth century, Labille-Guiard felt acutely the restrictions placed upon her. Denied most other artistic venues, she painted minatures, the earliest surviving example being a self-portrait, titled Self-Portrait of a Miniaturist (above, from 1775). This miniature self-portrait shows more desire than skill—the work of someone yearning to express herself but denied the proper education. Around the time of this self-portrait, Labille-Guiard became the student of Maurice Quentin de la Tour, who taught her the art of pastels, another accepted medium for women but one that de la Tour and others were raising to the level of high art. Moving on to oils, Labille-Guiard eventually became good enough to receive portrait commissions from the rich and powerful nobility of late nineteenth-century France.

The French Revolution, however, soon changed all that. Although Labille-Guiard herself sided with the revolutionaries, her royalist paintings put her in an uncomfortable position from which she could only extract herself by destroying many of her works. Portraits of revolutionary figures, such as Maximilien Robespierre (above, from 1786), literally saved her neck. Soon, Labille-Guiard took the revolutionary drive and led it in a feminist direction, demanding that women be admitted to the art academies as full students, which led some male revolutionaries to call her the “Joan of Arc” of French art—and not in a good way. Labille-Guiard even received a major commission with Jacques-Louis David to paint a public work showing Louis XVI of France handing down the Constitution to the dauphin that was never realized thanks to the Reign of Terror. Vigee-Le Brun, a staunch royalist, never campaigned for the rights of women like Labille-Guiard did, which makes Labille-Guiard the finer artist in the eyes of many modern women artists even before she put brush to canvas.

Ray of Light

While the Rococo raged around him in eighteenth century France, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin painted quiet genre scenes that would continue to speak to artists and art lovers through the centuries. Born November 2, 1699, Chardin painted perhaps the greatest still life of his century, The Ray (above, from 1728), one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre. Chardin imbued the dead ray on the wall with as much life as the skittish cat on the table. Chardin’s still lives abound with beautiful textures and nuances, which gives him a timelessness absent in his more dated contemporaries, such as Fragonard and Boucher.

What’s amazing about Chardin’s paintings is how much he got out of such simple subjects. In House of Cards (above, from 1736-1737), we see a young boy in period dress playing at cards, all very plain and above board. However, Chardin models the figure so beautifully, especially in his expression, which conveys his sense of intensity while building his house of cards. Beneath this simple exterior, Chardin uses the idea of a house of cards and that house eventually falling down upon itself as a symbol of mortality, a memento mori more pleasant and subtle than the dead seafood of The Ray and other still lives. These interiors appealed to the growing middle-class of Chardin’s time, who had the leisure and money to indulge in games and patronize the arts, especially painters who reflected their lives back to them. Chardin played a big role in the non-Rococo taste of the time, the art for the masses rather than the royals, by assuming a major role in the eighteenth-century French Salon as arranger of exhibitions and later as treasurer.

“We use colors,” Chardin once said, “but we paint with our feelings.” This feeling comes across in almost all of Chardin’s work, but perhaps never as much as in his self portraits, especially The Self-Portrait With Eyeshade of 1775 (above). The aging Chardin here protects his wearying eyes from the brilliant sunlight yet still has the dexterity to depict himself in pastels at a level of de la Tour. Manet, Cezanne, and Matisse, among others, would discover Chardin at the Louvre and embrace his spirit and feeling if not his technique. Marcel Proust, the novelist master of interiors and deceptive simplicity, found a kindred spirit in the work of Chardin. Chaim Soutine went so far as to hang a ray in his studio to paint in homage to Chardin, until the neighbors complained about the smell. In the often loud world of art history, Chardin speaks softly yet echoes resoundingly in the hearts of those who know him.

Blondes and Brunettes

One of the greatest of the French Rococo painters of the eighteenth century, Francois Boucher was born September 29, 1703. Boucher epitomizes the excesses—visual, sensual, and sexual—of the days of King Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, the King’s favorite mistress and Boucher’s greatest patron. Genre scenes such as The Interrupted Sleep (above, from 1750) bring it all together—a sumptuous landscape within which a young man awakens a beautiful young girl for reasons left unsaid but perfectly understood. It’s like a scene from Dangerous Liaisons. As risqué as such images may seem, Boucher provided even more sexually charged images of royal mistresses and even his own wife for a private clientele.

Denis Diderot accused Boucher of prostituting his own wife in paintings such as 1745’s Brown Odalisque (above), which displays Madame Boucher’s charms for all to see. Boucher’s debt to Rubens comes through clearly in his love of Rubenesque flesh modeled in paint. Boucher painted the 15-year-old Marie-Louise O’Murphy, calling it his Blonde Odalisque. O’Murphy later became one of Louis XV’s many mistresses (and one of the many to be defeated in her challenge to Madame de Pompadour’s place as the favorite). Beneath all the froth and frills of the Rococo style always beats a passionate heart full of the intrigues and energy of sexual politics. Boucher catered to gentlemen who preferred both blondes and brunettes.

In addition to his paintings, especially his grand portraits of the rich and powerful, such as Madame de Pompadour (above, from 1758), Boucher helped design the Rococo "look" like few others. Boucher designed sets for many Parisian theaters and later designed the “theaters” that were the royal palaces at Versailles, Fontainebleau, and Choisy. Maurice Quentin de la Tour may have been a better portraitist and Jean-Honore Fragonard may have captured more of the light frivolousness of the Rococo period, but Boucher stands somewhere in between those two poles—painting the reality of the time with all its sexual energy yet still playing (and in many ways, writing the “rules”) of the game at the same time. Comparing the portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy to that of Madame Pompadour, you can see that the poor little Irish girl didn’t stand a chance. Boucher died in 1770, well before the French Revolution brought all the Rococo crumbling down, but I suspect that he knew that those days didn’t stand a chance, either.

Putting a Face to the Name

I’ll never forget the first time that I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and was walking down a hallway from one gallery to another, trying to cram in as many masters as possible in a single day. Along the walls of the corridor were photographs and works on paper that I had to sadly rush by if I was going to see everything I wanted to see. Suddenly, one work stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t believe how lifelike the portrait was. When I saw that it was pastels, I couldn’t stop looking closer and closer. A self-portrait by Maurice-Quentin de la Tour, born September 5, 1704 , floored me that day and has kept flooring me since. (Another Self-Portrait from 1751, at the height of his fame, appears above.)

La Tour took the medium of pastels to places it had never been before while working in 18th century France. Having tried my hand at pastels, I never cease to be amazed at just how realistic he could make his portraits, pairing the precision of oils with the pure color of pastels. La Tour took France by storm in the 1750s with his incredible portraits of the rich and famous—everyone from the philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau (shown above) to Louis XV and his family. “I penetrate into the depths of my subjects without their knowing it,” La Tour once said, “and capture them whole.” Although the prejudice against pastels as something for children already was waning when he came along, La Tour shattered that idea entirely, opening up a realm of possibilities for later masters of pastel such as Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt.

Dying in 1788 at the age of 84, La Tour didn’t live to see the bloodshed of the French Revolution and “the Reign of Terror” to follow. Unlike the frothy Rococo works of his contemporary Jean-Honore Fragonard, La Tour’s portraits present the personality and individuality of the elite of his time, such as the intimate portrait of Madame Pompadour above. La Tour painted a life-size portrait of Madame Pompadour in all her sartorial splendor that wowed audiences at the Salon, but I find this simple head shot to get at the person behind the persona. Such psychological insight makes La Tour’s portraits seem almost modern today, enough to stop anyone in a rush dead in their tracks.