The Exceptional Woman by Mary D Sheriff
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favourite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, and one of the few women accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In accounts of her role as an artist, she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified as monstrously unfeminine. In this study 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 18th-century 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 and the world of this controversial woman artist.
Sheriff, Mary D.: - Mary D. Sheriff is W. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor and chair of the art department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her many books include The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Ar and Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780226752822 |
| ISBN 10 | 0226752828 |
| Title | The Exceptional Woman |
| Author | Mary D Sheriff |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago Press |
| Year published | 1997-10-24 |
| Number of pages | 368 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |