From the Footnotes to the Focus: Reframing Women’s Art Collections in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

Gender bias has often removed women from the realms of collecting, with men traditionally typecast as ‘collectors’ and women as ‘consumers’ or ‘decorators’. In wider discussions, the type of consumption associated with the feminine (or effeminate) consumer was frenzied, out of control, and lacking judgement and discernment. Although usually pointing to commodities like clothing, these judgements transferred to discussions of collecting – when women adorned not their own bodies but a room. The figure of the curieux was one who was driven by a desire to possess rather than to cultivate artistic practice through rationality, order, and decided taste – the polar opposite of the figure of the amateur, who represented the ideal in collecting practices, and was a title very rarely applied to women. This patriarchal model of collecting also assumes that only men had the financial freedom to purchase and assemble collections, and the drive to collect objects to define identity. Recent research has, however, proven that women enacted agency as patrons and through collecting—at least in euro-centric contexts and privileged circles—for purposes of self-fashioning and to construct identity. Further, evidence from sales catalogues alone suggest the existence of almost sixty women who owned collections in eighteenth-century Paris. A second key point of contemporary criticism suggested women’s vanity meant they prioritised the decorative and superficial in painting over those subjects which required deep cognitive understanding and appreciation. However, drawing on quantitative data from the composition of collections proves that women did assemble and display collections that went beyond the decorative and embraced historical and mythological subject matter.
In rediscovering and reframing the lives and experiences of women in the historical art world, preliminary and pioneering studies focussed largely on women involved in processes of art production, as artists and patrons. This research focuses on collecting rather than producing art. Whilst efforts are underway to spotlight the presence of women in the history of collecting, this field is nonetheless in its infancy, and despite several recent and important scholarly contributions to the field, women of eighteenth-century France remain under-represented. Many studies have focussed on a small cohort of women, such as the comtesse de Verrue, Madame de Pompadour, and Madame Du Barry. This thesis enlarges the field in analysing the collections of ten women: Madeleine-Suzanne Goullet de Rugy, madame de Saint-Sauveur (1720 – 1777); Marie-Anne Catherine Bigot de Graveron, madame la Présidente de Bandeville (1709 – 1787); Marie-Madelaine Josèphe Algaé de Cusack, marquise de Langeac (1725/1727 – 1776/1777); Marie-Louise-Antoinette-Charlotte-Françoise-Constance de Wignacourt, marquise de Cossé-Brissac (1750 – 1778); Clair Josèphe Hippolyte Leris, Mademoiselle Clairon (1723 – 1803); Madame Jacques Lenglier (or Langlier – dates unknown); Marie-Anne Mathieu, Mademoiselle Testard (dates unknown); Madame de La Haye (dates unknown); the marquise d’Albert (dates unknown); and Jeanne Baptiste d’Albert de Luynes, the comtesse de Verrue (1670 – 1736). This thematic study contextualises women’s collecting within the wider practices of ‘feminine’ consumption, and within the often-gendered debates on luxury and taste. Finally, an exploration of nineteenth-century historiography determines how early analyses and stereotypes have carried over into modern scholarship.