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 Adelaide
Labille-Guiard was born on 11 April 1749 in Paris and was the
youngest child of a Parisian haberdasher. In her teens she was
trained by the miniaturist Francois-Elie Vincent. One of her first
known work, a Self-portrait in
miniature, which was exhibited at
the Academie Saint-Luc in 1774, demonstrates a fairly finicky,
nervous touch, with a concern for the details of setting dress
that would remain with Labille-Guiard throughout her life. After
her marriage in 1769, and before 1774, she became a student of
Maurice Quentin de la Tour for instruction in the technique of
pastels. The attention to veracity in representing both the
character of the sitter as well as the details ol costume and
surroundings, so characteristic of Quentin de la Tour's work also
a hallmark of Labille-Guiard's as in the Portrait of the Marquise
de Montciel. Even ambitious, she decided to study oil painting
after 1777 and became an apprentice of Francois-André Vincent,
agée at the Academy in 1777 and eldest son of her first teacher.
During her training she continued to execute pastels and
miniatures. She also separated from her husband, and shortly
thereafter opened an atelier for students to supplement her income.
Teaching had a high priority in her life, and she continued
instruction until 1793. After the Académie de Saint-Luc had been
dissolved in 1776, Labille-Guiard found a new site to exhibit at
the Salon de la Correspondance, first showing numerous works there
in June 1782, including her Portrait of the Comte de
Clermont-Tonnerre (Anzy-le-France, oil replica), dressed in the
costume of a "Dragon de la Reine", which shows a skilful
rendering of costume and sensitivity to different textures, as
well as the accomplished placement of the figure in space. Also
exhibited there was a Head of Cleopatra, which depicts the heroine
in the style of Guido Reni, eyes raised to the skies, left breast
exposed to receive the bite of the asp, and which shows
Labille-Guiard's early interest in history painting. She was
exceptionally productive this year and the next, creating numerous
pastels of variatious members of the Academy, including those of
Voiriot (private collection, Brussels), Bachelier (Louvre, Paris),
Vien (Musée Fabré, Montpellier), Pajou and
Beaufort (both Louvre)
exhibited first during various months at the Salon de la
Correspondance, most of these pastels were re-exhibited at the
Salon of 1783 after her acceptance into the Académie Royal des
Beaux-Arts in the same day with another painter, Elisabeth Vigée
Le Brun, on 31 May 1783. Adelaide and Elisabeth were often spoken
as rivals in their own time, although Danielle Rice has suggested
that this rivalry was largely the invention of male artists and
critics who felt threatened by their female competitors. For her
reception pieces, she submitted the portrait of Pajou as well as
an oil painting of the sculptor Gois. She also exhibited a
sensitive portrayal maternity in the group picture of Madame
Mitorire and her children (private collection, Paris),
representing the granddaughter of Carle
Van Loo nursing a baby,
with her young son. With the accessories of the small round table,
the painting formally balances the round form of the mother, the
heads of the two children and the oval of the table top. Socially,
the work documents a contemporary fashionable attitude about
nursing promoted earlier by Rousseau. It may well have been this
work that attracted the notice of the Comtesse de
Flahaut,
sister-in-law to d'Angiviller, Directeur Général des Batiments,
who commissioned her own portrait with her young son gazing at a
medallion repesenting d'Angiviller's wife, an oil painting
exhibited at the Salon of 1785 (private collection; Jersey).
Indeed, Madame d'Angiviller herself had earlier commissioned a
portrait of the poet Ducis from the new academician. Other
commissions from nobility, such as the Princesse de Trémoille
(private collection, France), followed. It was at the Salon of
1785 that Labille-Guiard exhibited her brilliant Self-Portrait
with two pupils (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a work
possibly inspired by Vigee Le Brun's Self-Portrait with a straw
hat. The names of Elisabeth
Vigée Le Brun and Labille-Guiard were frequently paired by the
crics starting with their first exhibition at the Académie De
Saint-Luc. Both women were accepted into the Academy on the same
day, and both exhibited at the Salon in 1783. Reviewers of that
Salon generally favoured Vigée Le Brun with lengthier and more
laudatory reviews which must have caused particular dismay to
Labille-Guiard, who was sometimes even ignored. Such evaluations
may well have spurred her to reassess her production critically,
with the Self-Portrait with two pupils as a result. It was her
most complex effort to date. On the one hand, she demonstrated her
virtuosity as a technician in the fine rendering of textures (she
had copied ter Borch, for instance). On the other, while the
painting is part of the tradition of the artist and his family,
Labille-Guiard through her rich costume, elevated herself above
the class of ordinary academician, showing an ambition to rise in
social status. At the same time she affirmed that she was a
producer of paintings, depicting herself absorbed in the act of
creating, gazing at her model (the viewer). Further, the presence
of the name of a Vestal Virgin alludes to her role as a teacher,
keeping the flames of creativity burning. The work won much
critical acclaim, and also earned her the admiration of Madame
Adelaide, aunt to Louis XVI.
 Indeed, this interest helped
Labille-Guiard in her strait circumstances: in 1785 she obtained a
government pension of I000 livres. Both aunts, Madame Adealide and
Madame
Victoire, as well as the king's sister, Madame Elisabeth
subsequently commissioned portraits. That of Madame Adelaide de
France exhibited in 1787, was intended to be more than a capturing
of the physiognomy of the sitter. Labille-Guiard's largest and
most complicated portrait to date, the work represented the life
sized figure of Madame Adelaide standing in front of an easel,
on which rests a composite portrait in profile of her father Louis
XV, her mother and her brother, the dauphin, all deceased. Decorating
the architectural background is a relief showing the presence of
the Princess at her father's deathbed, when he was ill with
smallpox. Filial piety, loyalty and devoutness (a plan of a
convent rest on a stool) are conveyed in the painting, which is
intendent not only to indicate qualities of this princess, but
also meant to be part of royalist propaganda to support the
weakened throne of Louis XVI. The attention to the rendering of
specific textures is even more refined here, as Labille-Guiard
captured everything, from gilded wood to marble, paper to satin,
painted bronze to flesh. The pendant to the work, Madame Victoire
(Chateau, Versailles), exhibited at the following Salon of 1789
was equally meticulously painted, showing the Aunt on the terrace
of the property at Bellevue. Like many of the Vestals seen in
earlier French paintings, the Virginal aunt pays homage to a
sculpture of Friendship. A vase of lilies gave to Labille-Guiard the
opportitnity to demonstrate her talents as still-life painter,
while the background, claimed by one critic to be not
by her, gave her a chance to show her skills as a landscapist. At
the Salon of 1787, Labille-Guiard showed a work identified as the Portrait of Madame de
Selve, of whom the painter had exhibited a
pastel two years earlier. Vigée Le Brun seems to have provided
prototypical view of an elegant woman seated with her music in her
1785's Portrait of the Barone de Crussol. The sitter in
Labille-Guiard's works dress in their finest garments, even when
engaged in everyday activities. In both this portrait of Madame de
Selve making music, and in Labille-Guiard's self portrait, the
ladies wear elaborate plume hats. A similar painting, a Portrait
of Madame la Marquise de la Valette playing the harp, was shown at
the Salon of 1787. Labille-Guiard's opportunity to win acclaim as
a history painter came in 1788 when she was commissioned by the
king's brother, the count de Provence, to paint a large work
depicting the Reception of a Chevalier de Saint-Lazare by Monsieur,
Grand Master of the Order, on wich she worked for two and half
years before the emigration of the count in June 1791. The
incomplete painting was rolled up: in 1793 she received the order
to destroy the work.
 Any way, unlike Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun who
was a through going royalist, Labille-Guiard supported the
Revolution. Given this attitude, it is difficult to understand why
Adelaide painted portraits of the royal family and, in this case,
one of its most conservative members. While Labille-Guiard was
labouring on this large painting, she was also active in the
reforms of the Academy. Attempt to throw open the doors to woman
and gain status of her students, in September 1790 she proposed
that the number of women accepted into the Academy be
indeterminate and that those who were accepted be given an
honorary academic distinction of Conseiller only. Although the
proposal was passed by the moderates, the conservative
academicians turned it down and called her a "Jeanne d'Arc",
"a hen amongst roosters", spreading dissension among
them. The radicals, who formed the Commune des Arts, equally
condemned her. Ever pragmatic, with the loss of her royalist
patrons Labille-Guiard continued to paint portraits, like the one of
her friend Madame Genlis, through whose salon she was probably
introduced to various political members. At the Salon of 1791, she
exhibited portrait busts, some in pastel, some in oil, of
deputies of various political persuasions of the National Assembly,
from Robespierre to the Duc
d'Aiguillon. She was equally active as
an advocute for women, presenting the National Assembly with a mémoire
about the education of young women deprived of fortune (now lost),
to which Talleyrand referred as a model. Indeed, although the
Academy may not have been amenable to the rights of female artists,
the government commissioned Labille-Guiard, as well as
Jacques-Louis David, to paint a work representing the king giving
the Constitution to the dauphin. All sketches for this work have
been lost. During the Terror, Labille-Guiard obtained a divorce.
She remained installed in a country home in Pontault-en-Brie with
Francois-André Vincent (whom she married in 1800), but in 1795,
with the support of Joachim Lebreton, chief of the bureaux of the
Museums of Public Instruction, she obtained a lodging at the
Louvre as well as a pension of 2000 livres. She continued to
exhibit portraits at the Salons until 1800. In such works as the
portrait of her student, Gabrielle Capet (private collection,
Paris), exhibited in 1798, she maintained her high technical
standards and also offered a sensitive portrayal of another
serious woman artist. Adelaide Labille-Guiard died on 24 April
1803.
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