Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun

The 18th century, more precisely between 1715 and 1789, was a significant time period in the fashion sphere for women in France. The time period itself was a mark of great change for the history of France due to various political reasons as well as various art movements and often times fashion, despite being a branch of art, is overlooked by most viewers. However, fashion during this time excelled in France and was essentially the symbol of a new era in this domain; French fashion was now snowballing into something much greater that still echoes to this today. Ultimately, the goal of this essay is to describe women’s fashion during the period of 1715-1789 and the shifts it made through the analytical use of various sources including artwork, literature, museums’ online archives and internet sources.

A review of the world’s great artists conjures familiar images: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel; Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Pablo Picasso’s The Tragedy. There are many more, of course: Monet, Moya, Warhol, Rembrandt, Kandinsky. What is immediately noticeable, however, upon any brief study of art, is the significant absence of women as heralded artists—not only in our ancient pasts, but even today, amongst valiant efforts for gender equality.

Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity was written by Griselda Pollock in 1988, and later published in The Expanding Disclosure in 1992. Griselda Pollock is an art historian, and writes this article for fellow art historians. This is an article written to show the different approaches to femininity in the late 19th century, mainly dealing with the field of art. This article shows how during this time period there were women artists, but due to the gendered ruled ideas attached to art history, these women are largely ignored by art historians. Pollock thought that these women artists are primarily overlooked due to the fact that they are judged by the same standards that are affixed to the work of their male counterparts. But she argues

Celebrated artists Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun and Marianne Von Werefkin have contributed to the evolution of two different art styles and the appreciation of female artists. Le Brun’s Self Portrait in a Straw Hat exemplifies the prominence of Neoclassicism and the Rococo movement during eighteenth century France. Von Werefkin established herself as an Expressionist in her Self Portrait in the rise of the twentieth century. Both representational pieces provide the viewer with a candid insight into the temperament of each artist, reflecting their artistic influences and the time period in which the artworks were created. Consequently this has affected their application of colour, tone and composition, creating two distinctive self portraits.

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” -Oscar Wilde. Women are wild, sensitive, magnificent, mysterious, and above all: individual. Art’s many different medias allowed artist throughout the ages to capture women at both their strongest and most vulnerable points. It has the power to capture a woman: as a naïve, young girl clutching her brother as they are painted into a lasting portrait, a golden statue of an angel sent down to Earth to help a saved man take his first steps into an eternal life with God, to the powerful goddess, Artemis, transforming a hunter into a deer and having his hunting dogs tragically attack him. The six pieces of art chosen express the individuality of each women who has walked, walks, and will walk the earth.

The paintings that I will be talking about from the MIA will be Portrait of Catherine Coustard (1673-1728), by Nicolas de Largilliere, Diogenes (17th century), by Johann Carl Loth, LES FLANEUSES (2008) by Ghada Amer, and Portrait of Lucia Wijbrants (1638-1719), by Gabriel Metsu. My critique will be from the perspective of Berger.

The main subject of the painting is Madame de Pompadour, who sits half reclining, engulfed by yards and yards of colorful fabrics, with gilded furnishings and flowers galore, a celebratory painting of a “femme savant” (Goodman 1), at ease in her surroundings. Books and papers fill the scene, proclaiming her intellectual prowess. An educated woman, Pompadour is

17th and 18th century American colonial life was not easy for women, they were overworked and underappreciated. Women were married young and quickly took on all the household responsibilities, including bearing children. Husbands, quite literally, owned their wives and because of this women had no control of their earnings, property, inheritance, or anything else (Portland State University, 2001). Though, despite all the hardships women had to go through, some overcame the challenges and still found a way to become strong women with remarkable talents. Two women who exemplify this are Henrietta Johnston, an amazing painter whose portraits were unadorned to the eye but were created using an exceptional type of medium for her time and Anne Bradstreet whose poetry showed the love she had for her husband and the intimate feelings of a colonial women (Academy of American Poets, n.d.; Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 2016; Poetry Foundation, 2015; Sarudy, B. W., 2013). Johnston and Bradstreet both took on the typical domestic roles but still found a way to display their talents. Though, how did these roles effect the work they created?

Mary Cassatt is known world-wide for her impressing art in which she focuses mainly in the everyday life of women and children. She is an American artist born in Pennsylvania on May 22, 1844, but later relocates to Europe in 1866 to pursue to work in art. This was mainly due to her family’s and society’s objections to women in the field of art. There she met and befriended famous Impressionist Edgar Degas. Because of her close friendship with Degas, she grew courage to continue to do art in her own way. She continued to paint until she slowly began to lose her eyesight and later died in 1926. Cassatt was part of the Impressionist style movement, in which she painted portraits unlike many others who painted landscapes (biography.com). Her artwork

Each period has its artistic characteristics. The Baroque was a style in art that it stark contrast between light and dark. The Northern Renaissance gave so much attention and care and detail and clarity to objects. There are two different artists. Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was one of the artists of the Late Baroque period of the 18th-century. Jan van Eyck was one of the famous artists of Northern Renaissance art of the 15th century. I will describe and compare the Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Jan van Eyck's artworks. Also, I will discuss their careers, their styles, and life.

Louise Bourgeois is an artist provided the keys that opened the door for female artists in the twentieth century. She was born in Paris 1911, and immigrated to New York, New York in 1938 after she married Robert Goldwater a young American art historian (Getlein, 2012), where she lived until her death on May 31, 2010 (Layayo, 2015). The blood of being an artist has flown through her since her conception. She was born into a family that repaired seventeenth and eighteenth century tapestries (Layayo, 2015). Being an artist was her destiny, and her life provided her the tools she needed to achieve her purpose. While growing up in France she attended various schools of art schools that include Ecole du Louvre, Academie des Beaux-Arts, Academie Julian, and Atelver Fernand Leger (Louise Bourgeois, 2001). She continued her study and practice of art when she moved to Ney York in 1938 by becoming a part of the Art Student League (Louise Bourgeois, 2001). Students would stop by her apartment on Sunday to get their art criticized by her, and this

Fast forward to Chanel’s young adult life, and you can see it wasn’t long off that she would set up shop in Paris, France in 1910, eventually expanding out to Deauville, and then Biarritz. She had started off with designing, and marketing hats which became a very successful hit amongst the fashionistas of that day. Chanel’s empire was growing exponentially, and in 1920 she expanded into the realms of couture now working in jersey which at the time was unheard of in the French fashion circle. Soon she was blurring the lines of what was acceptable, setting fashion trends instead of adhering to the routine, and was giving way to entire style genres such as the “chemise” and the “little boy” look. Her fashion statements were a gigantic contrast to what was socially acceptable, and of course Chanel fell under scrutiny over it, but she went on to create more casual, shorter, and idyllically “liberating” clothing for the day’s modern woman. In essence she was liberating women from the stuffy, confining fashions that they were used to, and giving way to a loose more relaxed style all together while maintaining it’s inherent feminine charm. Chanel was creating more than just a design, or an article of clothing, she was creating a movement that would change the way society viewed fashion in it’s entirety. (Lewis)

Gender discrimination is an issue that is ongoing since the colonial times. However, the fight against gender discrimination is not just an issue of the past, but also an issue of the present. In the current 21st century, there are many people who are still fighting for women's equality in society. Women are still getting paid less than men, and are still looked down upon in certain career paths. More action is needed to bring awareness to people about the inequality women still struggle through. More people need to be informed about the inequality women face. Adelaide Labille Guiard’s oil painting in Paris from 1749-1803 called Self Portrait with Two Pupil, served as a propaganda to fight for women’s attendance in the French Academie Royale. It illustrates a self portrait of Guiard, herself, and two of her pupils, Marie Gabrielle and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond. In her self portrait, she paints herself in an art studio while her two pupils are by her side. Like Guiard’s self portrait, more effort through social media and the arts

huge changes to France. From her iconic hairstyles and fashion that that set the trends across Europe (check) and her

When one thinks of art and religion, one may think of gender role defiance and non-conformism. While this may be generally true in present times, it was not always this way. Women and men have had distinctly different places in society, these places often being unequal. Generally most well-known works throughout the ages have adhered to and represented what society regarded as the proper gender roles for men and women. This is represented in three works of art which will be discussed: Hamlet by William Shakespeare, The Courtier: Book 3 by Baldassare Castiglione, and Luncheon on the Grass by Eduoard Manet. While these three forms of art come from different times and are of different mediums, they are connected in that they follow and represent the gender roles of their time.