Marie-Thérèse Reboul

Marie-Thérèse Reboul (26 February 1738—4 January 1806),[1] commonly called Madame Vien,[1] was a French painter and engraver of natural history subjects, still lifes, and flowers.

Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien
Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien (1757) by Alexander Roslin
Born(1738-02-26)26 February 1738
Paris, France
Died4 January 1806(1806-01-04) (aged 67)
Paris, France
NationalityFrench
Known forPainting, engraving
Notable work
Two Pigeons on a Tree Branch (1762)
Spouse(s)

In 1757, Marie-Thérèse Reboul married the painter Joseph-Marie Vien, who was 22 years older.[1] Nineteenth-century sources state that she was taught by her husband,[2][3] but Joseph-Marie Vien's autobiography does not mention it.[1] She may have been a student of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte.[4] Prior to her marriage, Madame Vien engraved specimens for Sénégal: Coquillages (1757) by the French naturalist Michel Adanson and Dissertation sur le papyrus (1758) by the French antiquarian Anne Claude de Caylus.[1]

Two Pigeons on a Tree Branch, 1762

Madame Vien was one of only fifteen women to be accepted as full academicians in the 145-year history of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris.[3] She was admitted in 1757, the same year in which she married Joseph-Marie Vien. It had been 37 years since the last woman, Rosalba Carriera, became an academician.[1] Madame Vien's husband was a prominent member of the Académie, which likely led to her acceptance.[5] At the time, Madame Vien was described as "a painter of miniatures and gouaches specializing in flowers, butterflies and birds."[4] Her reception piece was Two Pigeons Pigeons on a Tree Branch, which she submitted to the Académie in 1762.[6]

She exhibited her works at the Salons of 1757, 1759, 1763, 1765, and 1767.[7] These included watercolors of a hen with her chicks, a kestrel killing a small bird, a golden pheasant from China, a brooding pigeon, and a bird of prey following a butterfly.[2] At the Salon of 1767, Denis Diderot praised A Crested Hen Watching over Her Chicks as a "very handsome small painting" that was "painted with great vigor and coloristic truth ... Everything's right, including the bits of straw scattered around the hen."[8] He concluded, more critically, "I'm surprised by her hen; I didn't think she was this accomplished."[8] Several of Madame Vien's works were acquired by Catherine the Great.[2] By the late the nineteenth century, few of her watercolors could be located.[3]

References
  1. Hottle, Andrew D. (2014). "Present but Absent: The Art and Life of Madame Vien". Southeastern College Art Conference Review. 16 (4): 424–442.
  2. Gabet, Charles Henri Joseph (1854). "Vien (Mme. Marie Reboul)". Dictionnaire des artistes de l'ecole française, au XIXe siècle. Paris: Chez Madame Vergne, Libraire. p. 690.
  3. Fidière, Octave (1885). Les Femmes artistes à l'Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Paris: Charavay Frères.
  4. Pomeroy, Jordana, ed. (2012). Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections. Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts. p. 120.
  5. Harris, Ann Sutherland; Nochlin, Linda (1976). Women Artists, 1550–1950. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. p. 36.
  6. Rosenberg, Pierre, ed. (2000). Les peintres du roi, 1648-1793. Réunion des Musées Nationaux.
  7. Seznec, Jean; Adhémar, Jean, eds. (1957). Diderot: Salons, 1759-1781. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  8. Diderot on Art, Volume II: The Salon of 1767. Translated by John Goodman. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1995. p. 136.
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