Title: The exceptional woman
First published: 1996
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.
Subjects: Psychology, Criticism and interpretation, Artists and patrons, History, Women painters, Vigee-lebrun, louise-elisabeth, 1755-1842, Art, political aspects, Women artists, Painters, france, Art, psychology, Art, modern, 17th-18th centuries, Women's Rights
Places: France
People: Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842)
Time periods: 18th century
LC classification: ND1329.V53 S54 1996