Portrait of a Woman

Starred review from March 4, 2024
Art historian Quinn (Broad Strokes) presents a deliciously inventive biography of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803), an overlooked portraitist for the family of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who “never wrote her memoirs, or... personal letters to loved ones” yet revealed plenty in her paintings, pastels, and drawings. Quinn depicts her subject’s childhood in mid-1700s pre-revolutionary Paris, and the creative education she gleaned informally as a shopkeeper’s daughter who lived close to the Louvre and learned from some of its artists. Pushed by financial necessity to find work, she discovered a passion in teaching and became a “mother of art” who “nourishe the next generation” of female artists, as exemplified by her 1785 Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Marie-Gabrielle Capet and Marie-Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond, the first European painting of a female artist with her students. Yet Labille-Guiard remained locked in competition with Marie-Antoinette’s “favorite painter,” Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, to whom she was often compared during her lifetime and whose legacy has overshadowed her own. Portraying key moments from her subject’s life in vivid scenes and colorful dialogue, Quinn breathes life into her cast of characters and the anxious times in which they lived, before “the Revolution began burning shit down.” This excellent work of art history deserves a wide readership. Illus.