Full Description
Thinking Women represents state-of-the-art feminist scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century French and British art and visual culture. Topics range from women and their activities in art and science, to gendered representations of childhood and animals to fashion, femininity and temporality. Some chapters center on individual genres like hunting portraits, or on specific paintings, such as David Martin's Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (ca. 1780) or Marie Guillemine Benoist's Portrait of a Young Black Woman (Madeleine) (1800). Others make contributions on the work of familiar actors like Jean-Siméon Chardin or Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. The volume also brings to the fore lesser-known figures including Marie-Thérèse Reboul, Madeleine Basseporte, Marguerite Le Comte, and Gabrielle Capet. Written by eleven distinguished (art) historians, the assembled essays engage with and honor the work of the late Mary D. Sheriff, whose unpublished chapter on women artists' self-portraiture opens the book.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction: Mary D. Sheriff: Charting New Possibilities for Feminist Art History - Mechthild Fend, Jennifer Germann, and Melissa Hyde
OVERTURE
1. Women and Modes of Self-Portraiture: Fashion, Motherhood, Sensibilité, - Mary D. Sheriff
PART I. ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE
2. The Woman Artist and the Uncovering of the Social World, - Lynn Hunt
3. "La touche d'une femme": Women Artists in the Age of Revolutions, - Paris Spies-Gans
PART II. GENDER AND FASHION
4. Chardin's Girls: The Ethics of Painting, - Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
5. Thinking Animals: Dogs and Men in Eighteenth-Century French Hunting Art, - Amy Freund
6. Temporality and Figures de mode: Fashion, Costume, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Drawings and Prints, - Susan L. Siegfried
PART III. WOMEN IN NATURAL HISTORY
7. Marie-Thérèse Reboul (Mme Vien): More Than a Footnote in Art History, - Melissa Hyde
8. Mlle Basseporte's Jardin, Mlle Biheron's Cabinet: Artist-Scientists and Their Spheres of Sociability, - Nina Rattner Gelbart
PART IV. ENCOUNTERS IN PORTRAITURE
9. Marguerite Le Comte's Smile: Portrait of an Amatrice, - Mechthild Fend
10. Imperial Family Portraits: Gender, Race, and Social Rank in The Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray, - Jennifer Germann
11. Madeleine of the Americas: Resituating Benoist's Portrait of a Young Black Woman in Colonial Art, - Anne Lafont
Index
