A Woman's Place: The Gendering of Genres in Post-revolutionary French Painting

The subject of this essay is the painter Angélique Mongez, who was a student of Jacques‐Louis David. Specifically, this essay examines how Mongez negotiated a place in the all‐male domain of history painting and how her contemporaries, that is the critics, responded to her claims to be a history painter. My discussion centres on the Salon of 1802, when she made her debut with a large historical composition, Astyanax taken from his Mother, but extends to the Salons of 1804 and 1806, when the issue of the woman history painter was debated more fully. Mongez’s challenge of the tradition that considered history painting an endeavour reserved for men was possible because she had access to serious instruction and to the Salons, unencumbered by the restrictive policies of the Royal Academy. For in the post‐revolutionary period one could not exclude women from history painting because any outright proscription was in conflict with democratic principles. The strategy, then, adopted by those who argued against women history painters during this period, was to encourage women artists who restricted themselves to genre painting. At the Salons of 1804 and 1806 the genre painter Henriette Lorimier served as the paradigm of the woman painter and the recommended alternative to Angélique Mongez.