The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art [Paperback]

Mary D. Sheriff (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226752828 | ISBN-13: 978-0226752822 | Publication Date: October 24, 1997

Elisabeth Vigée-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 accounts of 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 Vigée-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. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigée-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women.

Engaging ancien-régime philosophy, as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vigée-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work and the world of this controversial woman artist.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (October 24, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226752828
• ISBN-13: 978-0226752822
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #390,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun - not "an extremely uppity chick", May 28, 2000

By 

Julian Kerrell-Vaughan (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Paperback)

I would like to correct the lady reviewer of Waltham, Massachusetts who does equal disservice to Mme Vigee Le Brun and to the writer of 'The Exceptional Woman : Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun and the Cultural Politics of Art' in labelling the artist an "extremely uppity chick". The writer would also be the first to correct the reviewer's odd notion that she has rescued Mme Vigee Le Brun from oblivion. Elisabeth-Louise was not only the finest portraitist of her day, and generally acknowledged as such, despite early salon criticism - compare the charm of her double portrait of Therese-Elisabeth-Charlotte, Madame Royale with her brother the first Dauphin, with the pedestrian work by Drouais for example - but also a woman of letters. Her diary, which is also available, not only catalogues the people for whom she worked but describes them in a way that would summon them to life even did we not possess the canvasses she painted of them.

Her description of Marie-Antoinette and account of the Queen's sense of humour is touching; her account of being summoned to paint Mesdames Tantes - Louis XVI's rather spiteful spinster aunts Madame Victoire and Madame Adelaide - on their arrival in Rome - is also amusing. However, Elisabeth Louise was no feminist, nor would she have joined the camp had the movement existed at the time. She was fully aware of her talents and her charm, and felt not in the least disadvantaged by being a woman or of the judgements that this sometimes occasioned.

Ghastly phrases - 'extremely uppity chick' is one of the worst I have yet found in describing a late-eighteenth century woman - which betray a naievty and an atrocious lack of inscape can only harm the credibility of the feminist cause. I'll leave you with the words of my great grandmother, the first Englishwoman to be a Justice of the Peace, who on finding two suffragettes in her court, said, "My dears, you should realise, as I did long ago, that it is pointless campaigning for equality with a being who is manifestly our inferior in every way." Madame Vigee Le Brun realised this I am sure. I am sure too that she, like every woman confident of her femininity and unique value, would not stoop to generally denigrating men simply because they are men. Had she done so, we would have been deprived of so many of her magnificent portraits.

There is a very large collection of Mme Vigee Le Brun's works in the United States; the reviewer from Waltham can access it simply by typing 'Vigee Le Brun' into the search field on her computer.

6 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars See her work at the National Gallery of Art, October 9, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Waltham, Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Paperback)

Wandering goggle-eyed through Washington's National Gallery of art, I was arrested by the most lively, lush, *real*, and striking depiction of women in the whole gallery. Imagine my delight upon inspecting the plaque and discovering the artist was one of us! No wonder her subjects -- two rich French court ladies enjoying an afternoon in the garden with their children -- were not *objects*, as were the drab, blurred, unhappy-looking women in most male painter's work. Researching the artist, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, whom I had never heard of (but of course -- she was a *woman* artist!) I discovered Mary Sheriff had just published a book about her. I waited for the paperback and have ordered it, and can't wait to find out more. From what I can tell she was an extremely uppity chick, the best kind, and a survivor (usually a contradiction in terms in Elisabeth's day: she managed to scram out of France with her head and her money intact as the Revolution descended, although her buddy and patron Marie Antoinette fared less well, as we know.) Sounds like a great costume drama for Jane Campion, starring a strong, knowing, and savvy personality. Holly Hunter, Judy Davis have the strength. Elizabeth Shue has the look. Add Vigee-Lebrun to your collection of women who prevailed against the odds. Retrieve her from obscurity. Most of all: look at her work!