Marie-Denise Villers

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Young woman drawing from 1801, possibly a self-portrait of the artist

Marie-Denise Villers (* 1774 as Marie-Denise Lemoine in Paris , † August 19, 1821 in Paris) was a French painter . The artist is best known for portraits in the classicism style.

life and work

Marie-Denise Lemoine was born in Paris in 1774 to Charles Lemoine and Marie-Anne Rousselle. Her sisters Marie-Victoire Lemoine (1754-1820) and Marie-Élisabeth Lemoine (1755-1812) also worked as portrait painters. The family, which produced several women who worked as artists , lived on Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré (now Rue Molière) near the Palais Royal in the 1st arrondissement . The painter Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet also belonged to the family(1767-1832) who was a cousin of the Lemoine sisters. Marie-Denise Lemoine married the architecture student Michel-Jean-Maximilien Villers in 1794. Little is known about Marie-Denise Villers' youth, however, through her sister Marie-Victoire, who is 20 years her senior, and her cousin Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet, she came into contact with painting at an early age. There is evidence of her contact with Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson , when she exhibited three works at the Paris Salon in 1799 as his pupil . She also took lessons from François Gérard and Jacques-Louis David .

One of the works by Marie-Denise Villers in the Salon of 1799 was a “Portrait of a Painting Woman”, which was awarded a prize of 1,500 francs and viewed by contemporary critics as a self-portrait. In 1801 she exhibited “Étude d'une jeune femme assise sur une fenêtre” in the salon, followed in 1802 by a genre painting entitled “Un enfant dans son berceau, entraîné par les eaux de l'inondation du mois de nivôse an X”. Her last known picture is a portrait of the Duchess of Angoulême from 1814. Marie-Denise Villers was forgotten after her death and has only been rediscovered since the end of the 19th century. Her works have often been ascribed to her teacher Girodet-Trioson, but also to Jacques-Louis David. One of her best-known works today, the “Young Woman in Drawing” from 1801 ( Metropolitan Museum of Art ), has only been considered Viller's work since 1996. Art historians suspect that this picture is a self-portrait of the artist.

literature

Web links

Commons : Marie-Denise Villers  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gary Tinterow in Schneider, Daemgen, Tinterow: French masterpieces of the 19th century from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
personal data
SURNAME Villers, Marie-Denise
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lemoine, Marie-Denise (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter
BIRTH DATE 1774
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH August 19, 1821
PLACE OF DEATH Paris