Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The first collective, critical historical study of women artists in Britain and France during the Revolutionary era A Revolution on Canvas argues that women artists professionalized in unprecedented numbers during the Revolutionary era, engaging with the cultural and intellectual currents of their societies and earning substantial incomes from their work despite the obstacles they encountered.
Through an interdisciplinary analysis of these artists' careers, this groundbreaking book argues that exactly as political citizenship was being defined as a male privilege, women entered the public sphere as professional artists in significant numbers for the first time. Its subjects include a number of increasingly well-known painters, such as Angelica Kauffman, lisabeth Vig e Le Brun, and Ad la de Labille-Guiard, alongside copious other artists who were lauded in their own times but are little-known in ours.
This book challenges several longstanding assumptions and myths about women's artistic activity during this period, ultimately presenting overwhelming evidence to contend that with their art, women engaged profoundly with the cultural, political, and economic currents of the Revolutionary era, navigating institutional inequalities that were often expressly designed to exclude members of their sex in order to forge profitable artistic identities.
Synopsis
The first collective, critical historical study of women artists in Britain and France during the Revolutionary era In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hundreds of women in London and Paris became professional artists, exhibiting and selling their work in unprecedented numbers. Many rose to the top of their nations' artistic spheres and earned substantial incomes from their work, regularly navigating institutional inequalities expressly designed to exclude members of their sex. In the first collective, critical history of women artists in Britain and France during the Revolutionary era, Paris Spies-Gans explores how they engaged with and influenced the mainstream cultural currents of their societies at pivotal moments of revolutionary change.
Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the experiences of these narrative painters, portraitists, sculptors, and draughtswomen, this book challenges longstanding assumptions about women in the history of art. Importantly, it demonstrates that women built profitable artistic careers by creating works in nearly every genre practiced by men, in similar proportions and to aesthetic acclaim. It also reveals that hundreds of women studied with male artists, and even learned to draw from the nude. Where traditional histories have left a void, this generously illustrated book illuminates a lively world of artistic production.
Featuring an extensive range of these artists' paintings, drawings, sculptures, and writings, alongside contemporary prints, satires, and works by their male peers, A Revolution on Canvas transforms our understanding of the opportunities and identities of women artists of the past.