American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)

Anne Vallayer-Coaster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette

Review by: Sarah R. Cohen, Eik Kahng and Marianne Roland Michel
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer, 2003), pp. 571-576
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 EXHIBITION REVIEW 571

SARAH R. COHEN, University at Albany, State University of New York'

Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette. The Frick

Collection, New York City (21 January 2003-23 March 2003).

Eik Kahng and Marianne Roland Michel, eds., Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter
to the Court ofMarie-Antoinette (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press for the Dallas Museum of Art, 2002). 103 color and 262 black-and-white
illus. $60 cloth.

The exhibition of still life paintings by Anne Vallayer-Coster held at the

Frick Collection late last winter was the final American venue of a larger exhibi-
tion of the artist's work organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and held there
and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., in 2002. (The show will
travel to the Centre de La Vielle Charite in Marseille after leaving the Frick.) The
first major exhibition ever devoted to this extraordinary French painter of the
late eighteenth century, "Anne-Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-
Antoinette," and its accompanying catalogue of the same title, have substantially
enhanced our awareness and understanding of the artist while offering a convinc-
ing demonstration of why her works were held in such regard during her lifetime.
Immediately upon entering the galleries devoted to the exhibition at the Frick
Collection, one could see the virtuosity with which Vallayer-Coster employed the
language of still life as it had been developed in the course of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The bold, decorative lines of her compositions, the richness
of her colors and simulated textures, and the feats of illusionism she achieved in
depicting a wide variety of objects, both natural and artificial, provided ample
evidence of the attraction Vallayer-Coster's works must have held for the mem-
bers of the Royal Academy who received her into their institution in 1770, as well
as for the numerous collectors who purchased her paintings over the course of her
long career.
The exhibition at the Frick Collection was considerably smaller and more
focused than the two earlier stages of the tour: While the earlier, larger exhibi-
tion, curated by Eik Kahng of the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore), included
many of Vallayer-Coster's portraits and comparative works by other artists, the
show at the Frick, selected by its chief curator, Colin B. Bailey, concentrated upon
Vallayer-Coster's still lifes, carefully chosen to provide a sense of the artist's range
and the subtlety with which she explored the genre. With this shift from an all-
inclusive, retrospective display to a focus upon the type of painting with which
the artist was clearly most comfortable and most adept, the exhibition at the
Frick encouraged visitors to approach the works from a more meditative stand-
point, focusing less upon the overall development of the artist's work than upon
the particularways in which she deployed the language of still life. Vallayer-Coster's
portraits were, by all recent accounts, less successful artistically than her still-life
paintings, and thus, perhaps, most expendable for display in the Frick's limited

SarahCohenis AssociateProfessorof Art Historyat SUNY,Albany.Her book, Art, Dance

and the Body in French Painting of the Ancien Regime, was published by Cambridge Univer-
sity Press in 2000. Her current work addresses the intersection of ornamental aesthetics and
natural philosophy in early modern Europe.
572 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 36 / 4

special exhibition area. But one missed the opportunity to compare her works
with those of her contemporaries, notably Jean-Simeon Chardin and Henri-Horace
Roland Delaporte, the two artists with whose works Vallayer-Coster's had the
greatest affinities. (The earlier exhibition venues had included comparative works
by both of these artists.)
Given the Frick's small exhibition space, however, the group of works
selected for display provided a cogent representation of the various types of still
life in which Vallayer-Coster excelled: the flower pieces for which she was best
known, including works both large and small as well as a group of floral studies
in watercolor, gouache, and oil; paintings of dead animals in kitchen environ-
ments and in a single, large game piece; still lifes of food and table implements;
trompe l'oeil terracotta reliefs; paintings of shells and other natural curiosities;
and one magnificent example of her paintings of musical instruments, intended as
a decorative allegory. The way in which these works were distributed through the
Frick's three small exhibition rooms was, moreover, extraordinarily sensitive: a
skillful use of room dividers allowed the large-scale works to command the space
around them, as they were evidently intended to do, while sheltering and cluster-
ing the smaller works for closer and more intimate viewing.
In one room, for example, a visitor confronted, immediately upon enter-
ing, Vallayer-Coster's Still Life with Seashells and Coral (fig.l), a large work ex-
hibited in the Salon of 1771 with a pendant painting of minerals and crystals.
Given a whole panel of its own, the large, spectacularly colored and composed
painting of seashells and coral-aquatic life that had only just been assigned the
status of animals by eighteenth-century naturalists-stood as a monument to the
Enlightenment fascination with the natural world as well as an arresting demon-
stration of the young artist's representational skill. On the wall to the left were
paired two large-scale floral paintings, with a helpful label inviting the viewer to
imagine these imposing works in their original setting, the home of the collector
Jean-Baptiste Francois de Montulle, who had recently taken over the directorship
of the Gobelins tapestry manufactory. One could easily grasp the appeal of these
works to a collector of Montull6's decorative discrimination, for their floral pre-
sentation was enhanced by a reciprocal play within the accoutrements: while one
featured a brilliant blue porcelain vase with gilt bronze legs posed on a plain
masonry ledge, the other displayed a terracotta vase supported by an elegant,
marble-topped desk partly covered with a cloth flecked in the same bright blue.
Moving around the corner, visitors discovered a quite different side to Vallayer-
Coster's production: a group of tiny, trompe-l'oeil terracotta and marble reliefs
after sculptures by Louis-Felix Delarue and Clodion that one could easily have
mistaken for the real thing. (Vallayer-Coster herself owned one of the reliefs by
Clodion on which her paintings were based.) Featuring putti frolicking in charac-
teristic abandon, the paintings wittily teased the spectator with believable shad-
ows, chipped edges, and painted "frames." The Frick's careful spotlighting from
above enhanced the illusion of these little works, as candlelight might have done
in their original viewing circumstances. Immediately beside the illusionistic reliefs
were two miniature representatives of another category of still life that Vallayer-
Coster mastered: dead animals, in this case a pair of partridges and a single, white
hen, hanging as if in preparation for human consumption as food, but presented
as consumption for the eye, poised just off center within oval compositions that
emphasized the graceful fall of wings and the elegant stir of feathers. With their
combination of streamlined trompe l'oeil and pasty brushwork, the paintings
seemed effortlessly to combine two principal trends in eighteenth-century animal
 EXHIBITION REVIEW 573

FIGURE 1. Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818), Still Life with Seashells and Coral (1769). Oil on
canvas. Musee du Louvre, Paris, France.

still-life painting: the sleek illusionism of Jean-Baptise Oudry and Chardin'sbrushy,

materialist use of paint.
The catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Eik Kahng and Marianne Roland
Michel, reproduces in color all of the works displayed in the larger exhibition
venues and also contains a complete catalogue of Vallayer-Coster's extant paint-
ings and several scholarly essays. It thus provides a much-needed and extremely
useful resource for understanding the artist historically and artistically. It begins,
appropriately enough, with an essay on Vallayer-Coster by Roland Michel, an
expert on the artist whose 1970 monograph hitherto stood as the only major
scholarly study of her work. Roland Michel's overarching examination of Vallayer-
Coster's career is followed by several more specialized essays, beginning with
Kahng's fascinating comparison between the still lifes of Vallayer-Coster and
Chardin. Pointing out that our contemporary reverence for the work of Chardin,
and comparative neglect of Vallayer-Coster, are based at least in part on a Mod-
ernist tradition that would see Chardin's naturalism and painterly touch as her-
alding the formalism of Cezanne, Kahng repositions Chardin's painting in an
eighteenth-century context and considers how Vallayer-Coster both emulated his
approach and significantly departed from it, as if deliberately to "challenge the
master." Kahng demonstrates Vallayer-Coster's approach most penetratingly in
her analysis of the artist's brushwork, which was far more varied than that of her
eminent predecessor, for she incorporated both the visible, broken brushwork
574 STUDIES36 / 4
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

known as la maniere heurtee and the more precisely blended and polished use of
the brush, or la maniere fondue. Hardly arbitrary, Valleyer-Coster's variation in
brushwork was directly linked to the effects she wished to achieve in rendering
objects of different substances and qualities, so that in one still life one might see,
upon close inspection of its various elements, several different styles of painting,
each one attuned to the object at hand. The result is an illusionism achieved at
once through simulating material substance in paint and through a finely blended
precision of rendering that we today might call "photographic."
Following Kahng's essay is an informative one by Colin B. Bailey on
Vallayer-Coster's patrons and the collection of her work from her initial reception
at the Academy in 1770 until 1789. Here we learn that despite the subtitle of the
exhibition, Queen Marie-Antoinette was by no means Vallayer-Coster'sprincipal
patron; rather, the artist's works were purchased avidly by prominent aristocratic
collectors such as the prince de Conti, Montulle, and the comte de Merle. Bailey
convincingly argues that for one of her illustrious patrons, Joseph-Marie Terray,
minister of finance as well as directeur-general des Bitiments from 1773 to 1774,
Vallayer-Coster may have adjusted the iconography in a pair of works so as to
emphasize her patron's specific theories of gardening. Melissa Hyde, in a subse-
quent essay on "Women and the Visual Arts in the Age of Marie-Antoinette,"
provides further historical context for our understanding of Vallayer-Coster'sstrat-
egies in initiating and sustaining her professional career. Vallayer-Coster was as
exceptional as were Elisabeth Vigee-Legrun and Adelaide Labille-Guiardin achiev-
ing membership in the Academy and succeeding in a prominent, professional ca-
reer late in the eighteenth century, when resistance to women in the public sphere
was deepening and the Academy was as resistant as ever to welcoming women
into its ranks. Together, Bailey's and Hyde's essays construct an image of Vallayer-
Coster not only as a virtuosic artist but as a skillful diplomat and negotiator as
well, sharply aware both of her potential patrons' interests and of her own, un-
usual position as prominent woman artist.
The last essay in the catalogue, by Claire Barry, offers a careful technical
analysis of Vallayer-Coster's paintings, which yields fascinating suggestions as to
the artist's working process, from her use of various kinds of grounds, to the
question of whether she sketched lightly in chalk on the canvas before painting
(no underdrawings are visible in infrared reflectography), to her use of color and
her varied means of layering the painted surface to achieve distinctive visual ef-
fects. Once again, Chardin appears as an important foil for a consideration of
Vallayer-Coster's technique and, once again, we discover that while she clearly
incorporated some of his key painterly strategies into her own works, she did so
highly selectively and in combination with a number of other approaches. One
wonders, in light of Vallayer-Coster's evident ambitions to gain acceptance by,
and even to rival, her male contemporaries, whether her mastery and deployment
of several still-life painting techniques was, in part, a conscious demonstration of
her worth.
One aspect of Vallayer-Coster's art that was not addressed to a great
extent in the catalogue was how one might interpret her deft and varied portray-
als of so many different kinds of objects. Most of her subject matter derived from
the European still-life painting tradition, as it had been established in the seven-
teenth century and continued in the eighteenth, although it is clear from her At-
tributes of Hunting and Gardening made for the abb6 Terray, as well as from her
1771 "portrait" of the shells and coral that had just been reclassified as animals,
 EXHIBITION REVIEW 575

that on occasion she invented subjects with particular significance to their patron
or era. On a more general level, however, one can perceive in Vallayer-Coster's
paintings a continuous interest in probing the more fundamental implications of
still life as a genre that highlights the making of art out of life. She indeed stands
as one of the last painters to address a set of questions that lie at the heart of
European still-life painting, as well as at the center of eighteenth-century art:
what is nature, what is art, and how are the two related?
Everywhere in her still-life paintings Vallayer-Coster explored this prob-
lem. Her flower paintings, for example, with their rich displays of nature's arti-
fice, always encompass human art as well, in the form of ornately fitted porce-
lain, smoothed and beveled marble surfaces, or delicate crystal vases that capture
and reflect the light. One such painting exhibited at the Frick, a floral still life in
the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wittily encouraged the viewer
to compare two objects of seemingly equal decorative appeal: a blue porcelain
vase with gilded fittings, and a seashell placed just beside it, lavishly curved, spiked,
and shimmering with unblended patches of red, white and yellow paint. The fre-
quent appearance in Vallayer-Coster's paintings of such elegantly "fashioned"

tion these eminently Rococo objects still held for artists and viewers in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century.
While the constant play between nature and art was common to Dutch,
Flemish, and French still-life painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Vallayer-Coster'sdistinctive combination of representational illusionism and deco-
rative compositional structures carried the theme into the level of style itself. In
the Toledo Still Life with Game exhibited at the Frick, for example, human arti-
fice and animal bodies intertwined with such vividness and decorative integrity
that it was difficult, mentally, to separate them: dead rabbits, a partridge, and a
pheasant with a striking blue breast hung and sprawled in an artfully crafted
trompe l'oeil pyramid with a rifle, a powder flask, a pouch, and other accoutre-
ments of the human hunter. The soft, densely pigmented fur of the principal rab-
bit and the brilliantly brushed feathers of the birds formed the painting's central,
attractive core, as if to stand in as surrogate "clothing" for the hunter whose own
body was absent from the scene. The lack of blood or any sign of wounds on the
bodies of the animals (only a tiny pool of reddish paint lay under the rabbit's
nose) encouraged the viewer to imagine these formerly wild creatures as nature
given eternal "life" as art.
Like most still-life artists, and like such French Rococo painters as Watteau
and Boucher as well, Vallayer-Coster constantly re-used fragments of her paint-
ings in new formations. She treated the various elements-a basket of fruit, a
hanging fowl, a ham, a crystal vase-as a working vocabulary for ever new poetic
inventions. The large painting that introduced the exhibition at the Frick also
served as a retrospective summary of the artist's oeuvre: exhibited at the Salon in
1817, a year before her death, the Louvre Still Life with Lobster featured a pano-
ply of fruits, vegetables, meat, vessels, and hanging fowl, each rendered with
Vallayer-Coster's characteristic attention to individual look, substance, and tex-
ture, and many recognizable in whole or in part from other, smaller paintings,
some dating from decades earlier. The artist also imparted a particularly contem-
porary resonance to the work by including a flourishing branch of white lilies
informally standing in the water of a wine carrier-almost certainly a tribute on
the part of the loyalist artist to the painting's owner, the recently installed Bour-
576 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 36 / 4

bon king Louis XVIII. The result had the effect not of pastiche but of a new,
visual statement, achieved through Vallayer-Coster's careful construction of the
various parts into a dense, off-center pyramid. Close inspection revealed that a
natural "accident" yielded such decorative precision: a limb of one of the fowls
hanging at the top of the composition appeared to have just slipped from its
string, leaving a tiny noose swinging, somewhat eerily, against the background,
but allowing the birds artfully to delineate one, long side of the pyramid. The
sloping rhythm of bodies and legs created by the fall, ostensibly an accident of
nature, perfectly served the ends of art-and, in so doing, archly displayed a cen-
tral pre-occupation of the seventy-three-year-old artist's life work.

NOTE
1. I wish to thank Heidi Rosenau of the Frick Collection for her generous assistance in providing
materials for this review.