Thinking Women and Art in the Long Eighteenth Century: Strategic Reinterpretations

Thinking Women represents state-of-the-art feminist scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century French and British art and visual culture. Topics range from women and their activities in art and science, to gendered representations of childhood and animals to fashion, femininity and temporality. Some chapters center on individual genres like hunting portraits, or on specific paintings, such as David Martin's Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (ca. 1780) or Marie Guillemine Benoist's Portrait of a Young Black Woman (Madeleine) (1800). Others make contributions on the work of familiar actors like Jean-Siméon Chardin or Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. The volume also brings to the fore lesser-known figures including Marie-Thérèse Reboul, Madeleine Basseporte, Marguerite Le Comte, and Gabrielle Capet. Written by eleven distinguished (art) historians, the assembled essays engage with and honor the work of the late Mary D. Sheriff, whose unpublished chapter on women artists’ self-portraiture opens the book.

About the Author

Mechthild Fend is Professor of History of Art, Goethe-University Frankfurt. She specializes in French eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, with particular interests in feminist art history and its historiography, images of the body, and medical imagery. Her books include Fleshing out Surfaces. Skin in French Art and Medicine (1650-1850), published in 2017. Jennifer Germann is an art historian specializing in women’s history and eighteenth-century French and British art. She has published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, American Art , and cite>Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. She is the author of Picturing Marie Leszczinska (1703–1768): Representing Queenship in Eighteenth-Century France (2015). Melissa Hyde is Professor of Art History and Distinguished Teaching Scholar, University of Florida. She publishes on gender, the visual arts, and women artists and Rococo and its afterlives in the long eighteenth century in France. Books include Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment (with Mary Sheriff) (2017), as well as numerous edited volumes.