Anne Vallayer-Coster: Illuminating Women Artists

Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818) was 25 when she was admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1770, one of only fifteen women ever accepted, and she went on to win the patronage of Queen Marie Antoinette. Yet because she worked mostly in still life, a genre long ranked low in the academic hierarchy, she has received little scholarly attention.

Kelsey Brosnan, an art historian specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting, works on paper and decorative arts, looks closely at the still lifes and reads them through the lens of Enlightenment sensory philosophy. She also shows how the artist navigated the changing demands placed on women artists, the shifting tastes of her patrons and an increasingly turbulent political climate.

Praised by Katharine Baetjer, curator emerita at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Aaron Wile of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the book is an accessible introduction for readers of French eighteenth-century art, still life and the history of women artists.