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women’s uses of rouge were seen by the British as ‘whorish and brotherlous painting,’9 the French also criticised the growing use of ‘terrible vermillion’10 on portraits of English ladies from the mid 1700s. It seems that in both cultures, portraits that were seen as ‘cosmeticised,’
The eighteenth century was a time not without memory. Its masques and remembrances of the seventeenth century were vivid, if occasionally comical. If we observe the traffic that colonialism and world markets built, we know that cultures of dress were converging and each culture was gaining from the observation, whether admitting it or not.
The National Portrait Gallery's collection of fashion plates consists of 562 engravings, mostly hand-coloured and primarily showing women's dress. It spans the century from the first crude black and white engraving published in The Lady’s Magazine in 1770 to naturalistic, painterly compositions dating from 1869, when the period of hand ...
Apr 5, 2018 · With this framework to guide us, the focus then shifted to a specific element of the dress and accessories depicted in portraiture: the fabric. This proved an unexpectedly complex theme for discussion. As delegates learned, an 18th century dress will be made from and dyed with natural fibres and dyestuffs (with either an animal or plant origin).
- Angelica Kauffman
- Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
- Rosalba Carriera
- Marguerite Gérard
- Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
- Marie-Denise Villers
- Rosa Bonheur
- Olga Boznańsk (1865-1940)A
- Berthe Morisot
Born in Switzerland, Angelica Kauffmanwas the daughter of the muralist Johann Joseph Kauffman. She received artistic training while acting as her father's assistant from a very young age and copying the works of Old Masters as they traveled for commissions. As a young woman, she also trained in Italy where her historical paintings and portraits wer...
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a Parisian painter and is still one of the best-known female artists of her era, with work that straddled the transition from Rococo to Neoclassical tastes. Today, her portraits of the doomed French Queen Marie Antoinette are well known. At the time, the portraits raised Le Brun's profile among the courtiers of the Ancie...
Rosalba Carriera was born in Venice. Unlike many female artists, she did not learn to paint from a male family member. While it is unknown where she learned, she became so skilled that she eventually wrote a manual of techniques. Her early works of miniature paintings were quite popular with the European aristocrats who traveled through Venice in s...
In 1775, the teenage Marguerite Gérard traveled to Paris from her home in Grasse. She lived with her sister Marie-Anne Gérard and her brother-in-law Jean-Honoré Fragonard in the Louvre—a former royal palace that then served to house artists and their studios. The elder Gérard sister painted miniatures while her husband was a well-respected Rococo p...
A young Parisian woman, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard began painting miniatures before transitioning to full-scale portraits in pastels and oil. Like her contemporary Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Labille-Guiard was a popular choice among French royals and nobles in search of portraits. She was one of only four women who were allowed into the French Académie ...
Parisian painter Marie-Denise Villers was a member of the artistic generation coming to age in France after the revolution. One of three female artists in her family, she studied painting with François Gérard and Jacques-Louis David—as well as the female painter Anne Louis Girodet Trioson. The above Neoclassical work depicts the young Marie Joséphi...
The 19th-century Realist painter Rosa Bonheur was known for her stunning paintings of animals ranging from horses to bulls to rabbits. Living in a French country chateau she purchased, Bonheur never married. She wore her hair short, obtained a then-necessary permit to wear men's clothes, and even owned a pet lioness. She was the first female artist...
The Polish painter Olga Boznańsk began her professional career in Krakow in the late 1880s. She studied with artists in Germany and learned to specialize in portraits. At the turn of the century, she moved to Paris. She was awarded the Légion d’Honneurin 1912, among countless other honors. Boznańsk primarily painted portraits of women and children,...
Berthe Morisotwas an important Impressionist painter who was fully ensconced in the painterly world of the late-19th century Paris. Although she first exhibited in the esteemed Paris Salon in 1864, she joined the “rejects” (her fellow Impressionists) in the monumental exhibit of 1874 which came to define the movement. Her works were in oil, waterco...
Throughout 18th century, the composition of women's dress did not change basically, the most important point was the trimming. Especially after the 1770s, the trimming increased in importance, and marchands de mode were an active force. In the latter half of the 18th century, these merchants were responsible for producing and selling trimmings ...
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Jan 29, 2024 · Historian Richard Drayton decodes the potent messages behind the clothing worn in late 18th-century portraits. From the Winter 2023 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA. Barely 20, John Singleton Copley, the Boston-born future Academician, received the extraordinary commission to paint the daughters of Isaac Royall Jr.
