The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art
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About this book
Elisabeth Vige-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 Vige-Lebruns 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 Vige-Lebruns images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women. Engaging ancien-rgime philosophy as well as modern feminism psychoanalysis literary theory and art criticism Sheriffs interpretations of Vige-Lebruns paintings challenge us to rethink the work and the world of this controversial woman artist.
