Marie-Denise Villers

Marie-Denise Villers

Marie-Denise Villers, Young Woman Drawing, 1801, oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Born Marie-Denise Lemoine
1774
Paris
Died 19 August 1821 (aged 4647)
Known for Portrait painting
Movement Neoclassicism

Marie-Denise Villers (née Lemoine; 1774 19 August 1821) was a French painter who specialized in portraits.

Life

Villers was born Marie-Denise Lemoine in Paris. She came from an artistic family, and her sisters Marie-Victoire Lemoine and Marie-Élisabeth Gabiou were also accomplished artists.

In 1794, she married an architecture student, Michel-Jean-Maximilien Villers. Villers was a student of the French painter Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson and also took lessons with François Gérard and Jacques-Louis David.

Career

She first exhibited artwork at the Paris Salon of the Year VII (1799). Villers' most famous painting, Young Woman Drawing, (1801) is displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting was initially attributed to Jacques-Louis David and then to another of his female pupils, Constance Marie Charpentier, but is now recognized as Villers' work.[1] Art historian Anne Higonnet argues that Young Woman Drawing is a self-portrait.[2]

Villers exhibited Study of a young woman sitting on a window and two other works at the Salon of 1801, followed in 1802 by a genre painting entitled A child in its cradle and A Study of a Woman from Nature.[3] Her last known work is a portrait of the Duchess of Angoulême, exhibited in 1814.

Works

References

  1. Hess, Thomas B. (1971). "Editorial: Is Women's Lib Medieval?". ARTnews. 69 (9).
  2. Higonnet, Anne. “White Dress, Broken Glass: Starting All Over Again in the Age of Revolution.” Norma Hugh Lifton Lecture. School of the Art Institute, Chicago. October 2011.
  3. 1 2 Harris, Ann Sutherland and Linda Nochlin. Women Artists:1550-1950. Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1976). 217.
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