Women Painters, the Birth of a Struggle, 1780-1830.

A lecture on the exhibition in 2021 at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris

with Anne Catherine Abecassis

Our lecture, which is based on last year’s major exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg - Women Painters, 1780-1830, The Birth of a Struggle - will take us on a half-century journey through French art from the pre-Revolutionary period to the Restoration of the Bourbons.

The Birth of a Struggle featured some 70 works from public and private French and international collections focusing on an issue about that is still little-known: How the then-unprecedented phenomenon of the entry of great numbers of women in the fine arts was linked to key changes in artistic production (administration, education, exhibitions, criticism) and the evolution of taste and social practices in this turbulent era in France between two revolutions.

Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Marie-Guillemine Benoît, Angélique, Marguerite Gérard, Angélique Mongez, Constance Mayer, are only a few of the remarkable women artists of the era we will be re-discovering.

The sequel to this lecture will be on the current exhibition on at the Musée du Luxembourg – Pioneers! Women Painters of the Roaring Twenties – and is scheduled on Monday 23 May.