ACADEMIC TALK
Watch the lecture by Elizabeth Tiskina below and don’t forget to take a look at the extra resources and have a go at the activity at the end.
Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun: Women, Art and Society in 18th-Century Europe.
Elizabeth Tiskina
How did art depict the monarchy in 18th-century France? Portrait artist Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun exemplified the complex role female professionals played in representations of French society.
Further reading
If you’d like some short French listening practice, listen to this podcast.
Click here and here to listen to a philosophy podcast about Simone de Beauvoir.
Click here to read an extract from Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex. Read more about female painters in 18th-century France here.
The first self-portrait is by Rosalba Carriera, the second is by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, and the third is by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
Look up one of either Carriera or Labille-Guiard and see if you can dissect her life and work in a similar way to how we have just done for Vigée-Lebrun.
FRENCH ACTIVITY
For an extra challenge, translate the following passage from Vigée-Lebrun’s memoirs (you can find an online French dictionary here):
Il est devenu fort difficile aujourd’hui de donner une idée de l’urbanité, de la gracieuse aisance, en un mot des manières aimables qui faisaient, il y a quarante ans, le charme de la société à Paris. Cette galanterie dont je vous parle, par exemple, a totalement disparu. Les femmes régnaient alors, la révolution les a détrônées.
