Hood Museum of Art curator Elizabeth Rice Mattison recently published an article in Notes in the History of Art on the museum's 2022 acquisition of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun's Portrait of Marie Rose Sanlot (1776).
ELIZABETH RICE MATTISON, Andrew W. Mellon Academic Programming and Curator of European Art
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) was one of the most renowned artists in late eighteenth-century France. Her work has been celebrated in several landmark publications and exhibitions over the past thirty years. She is best known for her paintings made at the court of the French queen Marie Antoinette, as well as for her travels to paint nobility in the Italian peninsula, Russia, Prussia, and England just prior to the French Revolution and through the Napoleonic era. Study of Vigée Le Brun's career before her marriage and introduction to royalty, however, has been overlooked, perhaps due to her sitters' relative humbleness compared to her later aristocratic subjects. Vigée Le Brun's Portrait of Marie Rose Sanlot, likely the last work completed before the artist's marriage and recently acquired by the Hood Museum of Art (Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire), offers insight into her early work, including her networks of clients and suppliers. Click here to read Dr. Mattison's full article.