The exceptional woman
Subtitle: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the cultural politics of art
By: Mary D. Sheriff.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 353
Subjects: Vigée-Lebrun, Louise-Elisabeth, 1755-1842 -- Criticism and interpretation; Women painters -- France -- Psychology; Artists and patrons -- France -- History -- 18th century
Description: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favorite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, and one of the few women accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In her role as an artist, she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified as monstrously unfeminine. In the Exceptional Woman, Mary D.

Sheriff uses Vigee-Lebrun's career to explore the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional, and medical debates about women in eighteenth-century France.

Central to Sheriff's analysis is one key question: given the cultural norms and social attitudes that regulated a woman's activities, how could Vigee-Lebrun conceive of herself as an artist, and indeed become a successful one, in old-regime France. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigee-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women.

Engaging ancien-regime philosophy as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vigee-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work of this controversial woman artist.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 325-342) and index.