The Second Hand: Rethinking Women Artists and Collaboration in Paris, 1650-1800

Abstract

This dissertation explores how early modern practices and theories of artistic collaboration ambivalently shaped women’s professions as painters and printmakers in Paris from about 1650 to 1800. Canonically dismissed by critics as proof of women’s artistic incompetence, heterosocial collaboration remains downplayed by feminist art historians who champion women’s artistic independence. I build on their insights and oversights to propose a newly historicized model of artistic collaboration that leans into the fraught and feminine relativity of artistic identity and creativity before modern individualism took hold of those norms. This study contextualizes object-driven analyses of art through an array of period texts that together revive the dynamic methods and meanings of coworking between female and male artists. Alongside their letters, wills, and work contracts, I assess diverse perceptions and representations of artistic association and community in painting and printmaking manuals, marriage law handbooks, academic eulogies, and Enlightenment treatises of moral philosophy. Drawing critically upon feminist theories of personal autonomy and agency since Simone de Beauvoir’s epochal essay, The Second Sex (1949), I take the French long eighteenth century as a particularly ripe case to study what it meant for women artists to work as “the second hand.” Retracing the career paths of four understudied protagonists in French art history—Marie-Marguerite Oudry (1688–1780), Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron (1648–1711), Claudine Bouzonnet Stella (1636–1697), and Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837)—reveals that women artists and collaboration had a defining, dual impact on foremost artistic concerns at the time: art education (chapter 1), translating past art for contemporary audiences (chapter 2), the hierarchy of artistic media (chapter 3), and the challenges to representation brought by social and political revolution (chapter 4). Informed by these examples, the dissertation argues that heterosocial collaboration constituted a legally and culturally uncertain situation for women artists in Paris during the long eighteenth century. While it could enrich their worldview and redouble their professional and creative capabilities, it could also mean coming second to men: toiling in their shadow and never receiving due credit.