Artista lunii martie 2023 - Anne Vallayer-Coster 

Born in 1744 on the banks of the Bièvre near the Seine, Vallayer-Coster was one of four daughters born to a goldsmith of the royal family et compagnon des Gobelins.[3] One could assume that the artist's family tapestry business had some influence on her interest and skill in the art. Many of her paintings were indeed copied into tapestries by the Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins.[4] Since her childhood was spent in the factory, she had the opportunity to experience the entire operation of the business.[5] In 1754, her father moved the family to Paris. Vallayer-Coster seems not to have entered the studio of a professional painter, possibly because such an apprenticeship to an unrelated male was difficult for a respectable woman. Like other women artists of the time, she was effectively trained by her father; but also learned from other sources including the botanical specialist Madeleine Basseport, and the celebrated marine painter Joseph Vernet.[6]

She received early recognition of her career after being elected as an associate and a full member of the Royal Académie in 1770. Her strategies in initiating and sustaining her professional career were brilliant. She was exceptional in achieving membership in the Academy and succeeding in a prominent, professional career late in the 18th century when resistance to women in the public sphere was deepening and the Académie was as resistant as ever to welcoming women into its ranks.[10] A common image of Vallayer-Coster was not only as a virtuous artist but as a skillful diplomat and negotiator, sharply aware both of her potential patrons' interests and of her own unusual position as a prominent woman artist.[11]

With the Reign of Terror in 1793, the ancient regime, which up to this point had supported Vallayer-Coster, disappeared.[12] Despite her noble status and her connection to the throne, Vallayer-Coster was able to avoid the pandemonium of the French Revolution in 1789,[13] but the fall of the French monarchy affected her career. There is evidence that during this period of decline in Vallayer-Coster's career, she worked for the Gobelins Tapestry factory as a means to continue her artistic endeavors.[14] Although during Napoléon's reign, the empress Josephine acquired two works from her in 1804, her reputation was diminished. Vallayer-Coster concentrated on floral paintings in oil, watercolor and gouache.[15]

In 1817 she exhibited Still Life with Lobster in the Paris Salon.[20] In this, her last exhibited painting, she managed what an expert called "a summation of her career"[21] depicting most of her previous subjects together in a work she donated to the restored King Louis XVIII. There is some evidence that Vallayer-Coster gave it to the king as an expression of her joy as a loyal Bourbon supporter through the turbulent years of the Revolution and Napoleonic imperialism.[22] She died in 1818 at the age of seventy-three having painted more than 120 still lifes, always with a distinctive coloristic brilliance.[23]

Vallayer-Coster worked principally in the varieties of still life developed over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries.[24] Conventional morality precluded women artists from drawing from the nude model, which was the necessary foundation for the higher genres. Still life, considered the least intellectual of the genres and the lowest in the academic hierarchy, was therefore deemed the appropriate subject for female artists. While accepting this limitation in order to gain admission to the academy, the main conduit of royal patronage, Vallayer-Coster devoted her formidable technical abilities to the still life, creating works of undeniable seriousness and real visual interest.[25]

Vallayer-Coster used oil on canvas for most of her paintings. She achieved great verisimilitude in the representation of materials and textures through the use of precise, finely blended brush strokes.[26] According to the art historian Marianne Roland Michel, it was the "bold, decorative lines of her compositions, the richness of her colors and simulated textures, and the feats of illusionism she achieved in depicting wide variety of objects, both natural and artificial"[27] that drew the attention of the Royal Académie and the numerous collectors who purchased her paintings. This interaction between art and nature was quite common in Dutch, Flemish, and French still lifes.[28] Her work reveals the clear influence of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, as well as 17th-century Dutch masters, whose work has been far more highly valued, but what made Vallayer-Coster's style stand out against the other still life painters was her unique way of coalescing representational illusionism with decorative compositional structures. Her objective was to give an aspect of grandeur to everything that she painted; in doing so, she created an additional sense of stability and plenitude. The critic John Haber, who describes her work as lacking inwardness, says that the solidity and reassuring materiality of her compositions appealed to elite bankers and aristocrats, who could appreciate her rendering of "contrasting veneers of different woods" or "an extravagant collection of coral and shells, things that took years to come into being and will last for decades to come.