Self-Portrait with Straw Hat and Palette

The work of Marie-Elisabeth Lemoine, along with that of her three sisters and female cousin, is only recently becoming better known. She was among the students of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755– 1842), perhaps the best-known female artist at the end of the 18th century—when women painters were beginning to have more opportunities, though still woefully fewer than men. Here she depicts herself in front of her canvas, palette and brushes in hand. Her style of dress, straw hat, and gold hoop earrings—referred to as “à la créole,” a shape seen as emanating from European colonies— date the work to the early years of the French Revolution.

Tables like the one here would have held pastels and artistic materials; the top level would likely have been used for items including oil paint, stored at the time in pig bladders, before metal tubes were invented around 1841. The precise meaning of her gesture towards the table is unclear—but she certainly draws our attention, proudly, to her tools.

This is just the third oil painting by a European woman made prior to 1912 in the AMAM, joining Sofonisba Anguissola’s Double Portrait of a Boy and Girl of the Attavanti Family and María Josefa Sánchez’s The Crucified Christ in the adjoining gallery.