Lemoine, Marie Victoire (1754–1820)

French painter . Born in France in 1754; died in 1820; never married; no children.

Art scholars have yet to devote any meaningful research to the life and work of French painter Marie Victoire Lemoine, who was born in 1754. What little is known is that she studied with F.G. Ménageot (1744–1816), an academic history painter and portraitist who established a studio in Paris in 1774, and that she exhibited some 20 paintings in the Salon de la Correspondance in 1779 and 1785, and in the official Academy Salon between 1796 and 1814. Of the works attributed to her, which include portraits, miniatures, and genre pictures of children, only three self-portraits can be located. Her paintings of children, described variously as "young girl holding a dove," "small boy playing a violin," and "young girl cutting lilac," were apparently highly sentimental and may have been influenced by the work of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) who was known for his moralistic genre paintings.

Lemoine's best-known painting, Interior of the Atelier of a Woman Painter, was initially exhibited in the Salon of 1796 and now hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "This unashamedly ambitious tour de force declares Lemoine's ability to work on a large scale," write Ann Harris and Linda Nochlin , "to orchestrate an elaborate composition, to combine portraiture and genre, to provide moral instruction,

and even to paint still life." The work depicts two young women artists, one standing at an easel on which rests an unfinished painting and the other posed at a stool at her feet working on a sketch. Originally, the two women in the painting were identified as Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun and Lemoine, the former seemingly instructing the latter who is seated. However, since there is no evidence that Vigée-Le Brun was ever Lemoine's teacher, the painting may be some kind of tribute to her. "The picture does not have the merit of verity," contends Germaine Greer , "for it does not depict the interior of Vigée-Le Brun's shabby studio, nor is it a likeness of the artists who were both in their forties. It is rather a propagandist gesture and forms perhaps part of the background to the petition of artists and savants which made possible Vigée-Le Brun's return to Paris after her flight in 1791." Whatever the case, the picture did not have much of an impact, as Lemoine enjoyed only modest success during her lifetime. Greer also makes the observation that since the artist simply signed her work "Lemoine," some of her paintings may have been attributed to the male artist Jacques Antoine Marie Lemoine.

sources:

Greer, Germaine. The Obstacle Race. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Harris, Ann Sutherland, and Linda Nochlin. Women Artists 1550–1950. Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Knopf, 1976.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts