![]() But women were always viewed as something of an oddity in the Académie royale, or at least as something worthy of comment, even when their gifts were as incontrovertible as Vigée Le Brun’s. By the time she was accepted, in 1783, as a full member of the Académie royale, she was one of several dozen women who had been so honored, starting in 1663 with the election of Catherine Duchemin. ![]() But from all directions this matter of gender crowds in upon Madame Vigée Le Brun, and although the issues that it raises today are different from those of two centuries past, they are hardly less importunate.Īs a woman, Vigée Le Brun was not unique among the artists of the ancien régime. ![]() Perhaps, in a more perfect world, the gender of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun wouldn’t matter: we would assess this gifted painter-the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art-as we do her eighteenth-century male contemporaries, whose maleness, being assumed, is inconsequential. ![]() Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Jessie Woolworth Donahue. 1 Comtesse de La Châtre (Marie Charlotte Louise Perrette Aglaé Bontemps 1762–1848) by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), 1789. ![]()
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