Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

Born into a working-class family, Labille-Guiard was an artist unlikely to succeed by both gender and class, yet, at just 20 years old, was admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc followed by the Royal Academy in 1783 and made her Salon debut that same year.

Labille-Guiard was an ardent advocate for women’s artistic education and was herself a teacher to many male and female students. She frequently challenged the Academy to end limitations of the number of women who could be admitted and to allow them to sit on the governing board, and she presented a memoir to the National Assembly about the importance of education for young women of lower and working-class backgrounds. Her work is vital in documenting the influential status women artists had as both artists and teachers in pre-Revolutionary France, with her often choosing large canvases that allude to the scale of women’s achievements in this period.

Famed for her portraits of the French court, her neoclassical canvases and slightly muted finishing reaffirmed the more conservative values of the court of Louis XV while the opulence of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was the focus of social tensions. Although, in order to appeal to potential upper-class patrons, including both men and women, she often incorporated recent fashions into her paintings, which simultaneously allowed her to showcase her artistic ability and also the subject’s wealth and status needed to afford such luxuries.

As a supporter of the French Revolution, she remained in Paris following the monarchy’s collapse and continued to create work that now helped conceptualise and visualise the new French republic. Unfortunately, the culture that emerged from the Revolution was entirely different from the one before with her career, along with that of her female contemporaries, never reached the same heights and their influence was largely ignored which resulted in a great many paintings being destroyed in the Reign of Terror or dismissed by institutions, such as the Louvre, who refused her iconic painting, Self-Portrait with Two Pupils.