Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favorite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, and one of the few women accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In her role as an artist, she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified as monstrously unfeminine. In the Exceptional Woman, Mary D. Sheriff uses Vigee-Lebrun's career to explore the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional, and medical debates about women in eighteenth-century France. Central to Sheriff's analysis is one key question: given the cultural norms and social attitudes that regulated a woman's activities, how could Vigee-Lebrun conceive of herself as an artist, and indeed become a successful one, in old-regime France. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigee-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women. Engaging ancien-regime philosophy as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vigee-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work of this controversial woman artist.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was one of the towering figures to emerge in France in the wake of Napoleon. No other artist of the nineteenth century balanced a reverence for the past with such a strong ambition and spirit of innovation. Distinguishing himself from many other talented young artists in Paris, he gained renown in the 1820s for his novel subject matter, theatrical sense of composition, vibrant palette, and vigorous painterly technique. His vast production—including some eight hundred paintings, prints in a variety of media, and thousands of drawings and pages of writing—won the admiration of countless writers and artists, including Charles Baudelaire, Paul Cèzanne, and Pablo Picasso. This comprehensive monograph closely examines the full breadth of Delacroix’s career, including his engagement with the work of his predecessors, his fascination with the natural world, his interest in Lord Byron and the Greek War of Independence, and the profound influence of his voyage to North Africa in 1832. It brings to life his relationships with his contemporaries, ranging from the painters Pierre Narcisse Guèrin and Antoine Jean Gros to Gustave Courbet, as well as his exploration of literary, historical, and biblical themes, his writing in personal journals, and his triumphant exhibition at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Richly illustrated and encompassing the entire range and diversity of his art, from grand paintings to intimate drawings, Delacroix illuminates how this intrepid figure changed the course of European painting by heeding “a call for the liberty of art.”

European sculptors of the Neoclassical period often modelled their works in clay before producing finished pieces in marble. This book offers a comprehensive overview of Neoclassical terracotta models by European artists, featuring the works of0. Pajou, Houdon, and Canova, among many others.