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Lot Essay
Labille-Guiard’s vivacious portrait depicts the elegant young Marquise de La Valette playing a harp. The sitter, who was 25 or 26 years old when she sat to the artist, was born Marie-Thérèse-Odile Flahaut de La Billarderie (1761-1788). Known as Odile, she was born in Paris to Auguste-Charles-César de Flahaut (1724-1811), Marquis de La Billarderie and Marie-Jeanne Richard (1739-1816). Scion of a minor French noble family originating in Picardy and notable for its tradition of military service dating back to the sixteenth century, her father was a military officer who served as maréchal de camp, succeeded Buffon as intendant du Jardin du Roi in 1788, and was appointed governor of Saint-Quentin. La Billarderie was the elder brother of the Comte d’Angiviller (1730-1809), influential director of the Bâtiments du Roi and minister of arts for Louis XVI, and also related by marriage to Madame de Pompadour’s sister; both relationships served to ensure his status in the king’s court. In 1780, at the age of 19, Odile married Jean-Baptiste de La Valette (1746-1788), the Marquis de La Valette and Marquis de Pérodon, thus joining two ancient noble houses. The couple had two children in quick succession: Jean-Louis-Achille de La Valette-Pérodon (1781-1811) and Marie-Louise-Caroline-Auguste de La Valette (1783-1836).
Odile’s husband inherited vast sugar plantations and other considerable lands in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) and in 1786 – after entrusting their two young children to the care of Odile’s parents at the Château de Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau, the family’s ancestral estate – the couple left France for Saint-Domingue to oversee their interests on the island. Their stay in the Caribbean was, however, to prove short and tragic. Having been forced to sell some of their island properties, their fortune was stolen when the ship carrying them was pirated in the harbour of Port-au-Prince; La Valette died as a result of the attack on 20 February 1788, likely the victim of murder. Odile, who was pregnant with the couple’s third child, survived the attack and gave birth in her residence at Petite-Rivière-de-l’Artibonite. The child, a daughter named Aglaé-Marie-Charlotte-Elisabeth-Joséphine-Claudine de La Valette (1788-1790), died in infancy on the island; Odile herself died at her Caribbean home on 29 November 1788, just 27 years old.
Labille-Guiard’s portrait depicts the Marquise in happier times, before she left Paris for her fateful journey to the Caribbean. The painting was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1787, where it was listed in the livret as number 113 and was identified as portraying ‘M. de la Marquise de la Valette, pinçant de la harpe’. Although it is possible that the painting could have been based on a drawing and executed after the sitter’s departure from France, as Anne-Marie Passez suggested (op. cit.), it is more likely that the Marquise sat to Labille-Guiard in 1786 before she undertook the move. The artist presents her model against a lightly modelled grey background, with Odile strumming the strings of her harp as she turns to look at us directly, with a candid gaze and slight, shy smile on her lips. Wearing a lace-trimmed, pearlescent blue-grey satin gown in the style called robe à l’anglaise, with a silk gauze kerchief embroidered with small flowers draped over her shoulders, she is a model of fashionable – if not strictly modern – aristocratic modesty. Rosy-cheeked with the creamy complexion of youth, Odile has an elaborate headdress of blue ribbons, silk gauze and pink flower buds atop her thick and curling dark hair, which is lightly powdered. While her cherry hardwood harp is carved with Louis XV-era decorative flourishes, her giltwood chair is of the most current neoclassical fashion. The chair may have been one in ready use in Labille-Guiard’s studio, as the artist poses herself in the same chair in her celebrated 1785 Self-Portrait with Two Pupils in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 1). Seen through the strings of her harp is the (unidentifiable) musical manuscript which guides her, opened on a music stand.
The Salon of 1787, where the present portrait was exhibited, represented without doubt the pinnacle of Labille-Guiard’s career. Of the nine identified portraits that the artist showed that year, two were of ‘Mesdames’, the surviving unmarried daughters of Louis XV and Queen Marie Leszczyńska. The life-size, full-length portrait of Madame Adélaïde (1732-1800) depicted in the royal palace standing beside a large portrait medallion of the king, queen and Dauphin (Versailles) was the most admired and discussed painting of the exhibition, after Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Socrates (1787; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The sharply characterised bust-length pastel of Madame Victoire (1733-1799) is a masterpiece of the medium and memorably captures the ageing woman’s crafty intelligence (Versailles). A third, three-quarter-length oil portrait of Madame Élisabeth (1764-1794), the youngest sister of Louis XVI, is a sumptuous rendering of the young princess as a savant, surrounded by attributes of the sciences. So pleased with the portraits were ‘Mesdames’ that days before the opening of the Salon they had Labille-Guiard appointed ‘Peintre de ces Princesses’ – their official artist, a title which brought her esteem as well as further prestigious commissions.
Although critical attention to her contributions to the 1787 Salon focused almost entirely on the royal portraits, the present portrait of the Marquise de La Valette masterfully displays Labille-Guiard’s particular gifts as a painter. She was renowned for flattering but lively and incisive likenesses, as well as her expertise in the rendering of textures, fine fabrics – silks, satins, lace – and furnishings, a pleasing and graceful sense of colour, and an eye for naturalistic detail (notice the loose knots of the gut strings at the top of the harp frame). The comparative informality of the composition and Odile’s pose, and her direct gaze at the viewer, are characteristic of most of Labille-Guiard’s finest portraits. ‘Today’, wrote the art critic and memoirist Louis-Petit de Bachaumont, ‘it is Madame Guiard who triumphs and surrounds her productions with cries of surprise and involuntary delight that are only achieved through a real and brilliant merit’ (Mémoires secrets, XXX, 22 September 1785, p. 160).
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s triumph with the art establishment, critics and patrons could hardly have been less predictable or harder-won. Born to a working-class family in Paris in 1749, the eighth child of a haberdasher and his wife, her early education is entirely undocumented. Unusually for a female artist in the eighteenth century, Adélaïde was not born to a father who was himself a painter able to train her; her strong artistic bent must, therefore, have encouraged her parents to place her in the tutelage of François-Elie Vincent (1708-1790), a miniaturist whose studio was not far from her father’s shop. Vincent’s son, François-André Vincent (1746-1816) – who would later become one of the most celebrated history painters of the neoclassical movement – was initially a fellow student of Adélaïde in his father’s studio, later the teacher who taught her to master oil painting and finally, after many years as lovers, her second husband. (Labille had previously married Louis-Nicolas Guiard in 1769, a financial clerk whose name she took; legally separated from him a decade later, they formally divorced in 1793, immediately after divorce was legalised by the Revolutionary government. She married François-André Vincent in 1800.)
To learn the technique of pastels, Labille-Guiard trained from 1769 to 1774 with Maurice Quentin de La Tour, the greatest pastellist of the age. Having become a member in 1774 of the Académie de Saint-Luc, the less-prestigious rival to the Académie Royale, she exhibited pastels and miniatures in their public exhibitions. When the Académie de Saint-Luc was abolished by royal decree in 1777, she worked for several years under Vincent’s guidance to master the art of oil painting, then brought her work to public attention by exhibiting at the Salon de la Correspondance, where it was widely praised. She relentlessly advocated (with the support of Vincent) for admission to the restrictive Académie Royale, which capped its female membership to no more than four women at any given time. In May 1783, following a widespread pressure campaign, the academicians voted to admit both Labille-Guiard and her great rival, Madame Vigée Le Brun, on the same day, making them provisional members and full academicians at once.
Operating a significant studio of her own, Labille-Guiard prioritised the artistic training of women and was said to be an exceptional and committed instructor who actively campaigned to make the privileges and advantages of the Académie Royale available to other female artists. She was the first woman to obtain lodgings in the Louvre (overcoming years of obstacles) and set up a studio for her students in her rooms; her famous Self-Portrait with Two Pupils – Gabrielle Capet and Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond – thus served as something of a mission statement, a fact not lost on critics and spectators at the Salon of 1785. Despite her royal commissions and connections, Labille-Guiard supported the Revolution and survived the fall of the monarchy, although by 1792 she and Vincent retreated to the countryside and she sent fewer works to the annual Salons. Labille-Guiard died in Paris on 24 April 1803 at age 54.
Odile’s husband inherited vast sugar plantations and other considerable lands in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) and in 1786 – after entrusting their two young children to the care of Odile’s parents at the Château de Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau, the family’s ancestral estate – the couple left France for Saint-Domingue to oversee their interests on the island. Their stay in the Caribbean was, however, to prove short and tragic. Having been forced to sell some of their island properties, their fortune was stolen when the ship carrying them was pirated in the harbour of Port-au-Prince; La Valette died as a result of the attack on 20 February 1788, likely the victim of murder. Odile, who was pregnant with the couple’s third child, survived the attack and gave birth in her residence at Petite-Rivière-de-l’Artibonite. The child, a daughter named Aglaé-Marie-Charlotte-Elisabeth-Joséphine-Claudine de La Valette (1788-1790), died in infancy on the island; Odile herself died at her Caribbean home on 29 November 1788, just 27 years old.
Labille-Guiard’s portrait depicts the Marquise in happier times, before she left Paris for her fateful journey to the Caribbean. The painting was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1787, where it was listed in the livret as number 113 and was identified as portraying ‘M. de la Marquise de la Valette, pinçant de la harpe’. Although it is possible that the painting could have been based on a drawing and executed after the sitter’s departure from France, as Anne-Marie Passez suggested (op. cit.), it is more likely that the Marquise sat to Labille-Guiard in 1786 before she undertook the move. The artist presents her model against a lightly modelled grey background, with Odile strumming the strings of her harp as she turns to look at us directly, with a candid gaze and slight, shy smile on her lips. Wearing a lace-trimmed, pearlescent blue-grey satin gown in the style called robe à l’anglaise, with a silk gauze kerchief embroidered with small flowers draped over her shoulders, she is a model of fashionable – if not strictly modern – aristocratic modesty. Rosy-cheeked with the creamy complexion of youth, Odile has an elaborate headdress of blue ribbons, silk gauze and pink flower buds atop her thick and curling dark hair, which is lightly powdered. While her cherry hardwood harp is carved with Louis XV-era decorative flourishes, her giltwood chair is of the most current neoclassical fashion. The chair may have been one in ready use in Labille-Guiard’s studio, as the artist poses herself in the same chair in her celebrated 1785 Self-Portrait with Two Pupils in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 1). Seen through the strings of her harp is the (unidentifiable) musical manuscript which guides her, opened on a music stand.
The Salon of 1787, where the present portrait was exhibited, represented without doubt the pinnacle of Labille-Guiard’s career. Of the nine identified portraits that the artist showed that year, two were of ‘Mesdames’, the surviving unmarried daughters of Louis XV and Queen Marie Leszczyńska. The life-size, full-length portrait of Madame Adélaïde (1732-1800) depicted in the royal palace standing beside a large portrait medallion of the king, queen and Dauphin (Versailles) was the most admired and discussed painting of the exhibition, after Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Socrates (1787; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The sharply characterised bust-length pastel of Madame Victoire (1733-1799) is a masterpiece of the medium and memorably captures the ageing woman’s crafty intelligence (Versailles). A third, three-quarter-length oil portrait of Madame Élisabeth (1764-1794), the youngest sister of Louis XVI, is a sumptuous rendering of the young princess as a savant, surrounded by attributes of the sciences. So pleased with the portraits were ‘Mesdames’ that days before the opening of the Salon they had Labille-Guiard appointed ‘Peintre de ces Princesses’ – their official artist, a title which brought her esteem as well as further prestigious commissions.
Although critical attention to her contributions to the 1787 Salon focused almost entirely on the royal portraits, the present portrait of the Marquise de La Valette masterfully displays Labille-Guiard’s particular gifts as a painter. She was renowned for flattering but lively and incisive likenesses, as well as her expertise in the rendering of textures, fine fabrics – silks, satins, lace – and furnishings, a pleasing and graceful sense of colour, and an eye for naturalistic detail (notice the loose knots of the gut strings at the top of the harp frame). The comparative informality of the composition and Odile’s pose, and her direct gaze at the viewer, are characteristic of most of Labille-Guiard’s finest portraits. ‘Today’, wrote the art critic and memoirist Louis-Petit de Bachaumont, ‘it is Madame Guiard who triumphs and surrounds her productions with cries of surprise and involuntary delight that are only achieved through a real and brilliant merit’ (Mémoires secrets, XXX, 22 September 1785, p. 160).
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s triumph with the art establishment, critics and patrons could hardly have been less predictable or harder-won. Born to a working-class family in Paris in 1749, the eighth child of a haberdasher and his wife, her early education is entirely undocumented. Unusually for a female artist in the eighteenth century, Adélaïde was not born to a father who was himself a painter able to train her; her strong artistic bent must, therefore, have encouraged her parents to place her in the tutelage of François-Elie Vincent (1708-1790), a miniaturist whose studio was not far from her father’s shop. Vincent’s son, François-André Vincent (1746-1816) – who would later become one of the most celebrated history painters of the neoclassical movement – was initially a fellow student of Adélaïde in his father’s studio, later the teacher who taught her to master oil painting and finally, after many years as lovers, her second husband. (Labille had previously married Louis-Nicolas Guiard in 1769, a financial clerk whose name she took; legally separated from him a decade later, they formally divorced in 1793, immediately after divorce was legalised by the Revolutionary government. She married François-André Vincent in 1800.)
To learn the technique of pastels, Labille-Guiard trained from 1769 to 1774 with Maurice Quentin de La Tour, the greatest pastellist of the age. Having become a member in 1774 of the Académie de Saint-Luc, the less-prestigious rival to the Académie Royale, she exhibited pastels and miniatures in their public exhibitions. When the Académie de Saint-Luc was abolished by royal decree in 1777, she worked for several years under Vincent’s guidance to master the art of oil painting, then brought her work to public attention by exhibiting at the Salon de la Correspondance, where it was widely praised. She relentlessly advocated (with the support of Vincent) for admission to the restrictive Académie Royale, which capped its female membership to no more than four women at any given time. In May 1783, following a widespread pressure campaign, the academicians voted to admit both Labille-Guiard and her great rival, Madame Vigée Le Brun, on the same day, making them provisional members and full academicians at once.
Operating a significant studio of her own, Labille-Guiard prioritised the artistic training of women and was said to be an exceptional and committed instructor who actively campaigned to make the privileges and advantages of the Académie Royale available to other female artists. She was the first woman to obtain lodgings in the Louvre (overcoming years of obstacles) and set up a studio for her students in her rooms; her famous Self-Portrait with Two Pupils – Gabrielle Capet and Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond – thus served as something of a mission statement, a fact not lost on critics and spectators at the Salon of 1785. Despite her royal commissions and connections, Labille-Guiard supported the Revolution and survived the fall of the monarchy, although by 1792 she and Vincent retreated to the countryside and she sent fewer works to the annual Salons. Labille-Guiard died in Paris on 24 April 1803 at age 54.