Royalists to Romantics

The rich collections of paintings and sculptures by women in the Louvre, Versailles, Fontainebleau and other venerable French collections present an outstanding opportunity to explore the important contributions that women artists made in France between 1750 and 1848, a period that saw the waning of the ancien régime, the traumas of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy. Royalists to Romantics features some seventy-five paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings by thirty-five French women artists of this era. These stunning works both illuminate their makers’ careers and offer a new narrative about the art world of the Revolutionary period. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, this beautifully illustrated book examines eighteenth-century French theories of sexual difference and their influence on the ‘woman-artist question’; paradoxical Revolutionary attitudes toward women artists, who encountered as many new limitations as opportunities; and the complex ways that women marketed their reputations and managed their cultural positions in France’s intricate social and artistic hierarchy.