Adding product to your cart
| Author/Contributor(s): |
Sheriff, Mary D
|
| Publisher: |
University of Chicago Press
|
| Date: |
10/24/1997
|
| Binding: |
Paperback
|
| Condition: |
NEW
|
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.
Use left/right arrows to navigate the slideshow or swipe left/right if using a mobile device
