Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

France·1749-1803

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803) was a Parisian painter who built her career on portraits and pastels at a moment when women were barred from most formal training. Taught miniature painting by François-Élie Vincent and pastel by Quentin de La Tour, she later studied oil painting with his son François-André Vincent, whom she eventually married. Admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc in 1767, she was received into the Royal Academy in 1783 alongside her rival Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, becoming one of the first women in that body. As peintre des Mesdames she portrayed the king's aunts, and she pursued an ambitious history painting for the Comte de Provence that was destroyed during the Revolution. She stayed in France through the upheaval, painting revolutionary deputies, and in 1795 became the first woman granted a studio at the Louvre. Her self-portraits, especially the one with two students now in New York, show her arguing visually for women's place among painters. Work by her survives in museums across Europe and the United States, including Honolulu.