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Brigid von Preussen, A Woman’s Work, Art History, Volume 48, Issue 1, February 2025, Pages 186–192, https://doi.org/10.1093/arthis/ulaf003
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A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830, by Paris A. Spies-Gans, New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 2022, 384 pp., 157 col. and b. & w. illus., hardback, £45.
Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great, by Rosalind P. Blakesley, London: Lund Humphries, 2023, 152 pp., 62 col. illus., hardback, £45.
When the painter Marie-Nicole Dumont exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon in 1793, the Terror was in full swing. The former king Louis XVI had already been executed and his wife Marie Antoinette, whose portraits had graced the walls of the pre-Revolutionary Salon just a few years earlier, would soon share his fate. At this moment of intense political turmoil, Dumont’s submission, a self-portrait entitled The Author at her Occupations (plate 1), suggested a window into a quieter life. Ensconced in an elegant domestic interior, Dumont depicts herself as an accomplished and fashionable woman who is both a mother and a painter. She is poised between her infant son’s cradle and a half-finished portrait on an easel, which represents either her husband or father (both were artists themselves). Holding a palette and brushes in one hand, she uses the other to lift the fabric covering the cradle to reveal her baby, who lifts his chubby arms in supplication. As Dumont displays the fruits of two different kinds of labour, a direct line is drawn from the portrait to her and her child, implying a lineage that is both genetic and artistic.
