The Brooklyn Rail

If you’ve heard of any eighteenth-century French woman artist, it’s probably not the one that art historian and author Bridget Quinn thinks you should know. The one you’ve heard of is probably Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, preferred portraitist of Marie Antoinette (before things went south). Quinn thinks you should actually know about Vigée Le Brun’s contemporary and rival, and her longtime personal favorite, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, and has spent decades plotting how to write—and publish—the story of this obscure painter of grand portraits and miniatures.

Quinn practiced her storytelling skills on other historic women, first. In her debut book, Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (In That Order) (2017), Quinn used her distinctive voice (and an arsenal of four-letter words) to tell mini biographies of fifteen female artists from 1600 to the present. Her next book, She Votes: How U.S. Women Won Suffrage, and What Happened Next (2020), was a centennial celebration of American women who fought for suffrage. And this April she released Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry & Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, a deep dive for general interest audiences about a painter who has captivated Quinn since she was a twenty-something graduate student studying art history and deciding what to do with her life.

I spoke with Quinn about Labille-Guiard and why her story matters, the uphill battle of writing books about historic women artists, and why she thinks that things are changing.

Karen Chernick (Rail): Portrait of a Woman is a book you’ve said you wanted to write for decades. Why did it take so long?

Bridget Quinn: Ouch! There’s many answers to that. One is that I intended to start a Ph.D., but visiting Labille-Guiard’s—I call her Adélaïde—self-portrait in the Met spurred me to leave. I decided not to continue from the master’s to the Ph.D. because I wanted to become a writer. It takes time to learn to write, time to learn how to tell a story, so that’s my first excuse.

It took time to build a career. Then to find a publisher willing to publish a biography of a relatively obscure eighteenth-century artist, no matter who they are, is really not easy. Until recently, publishing about women artists wasn’t common, and it was certainly uncommon in general interest writing. I’m an art historian, writing for a general audience. To convince a publisher that this person is worthy of a book is not easy. It really took writing—this is my third book with Chronicle, about women and history—building that relationship, and their incredible support, to be able to do it. I am stunned that it exists. It’s a kind of miracle. It took over thirty years, but I finally felt ready.

Rail: What were the challenges in researching Labille-Guiard?

Quinn: Well, first of all, how lucky am I? I get a book contract to write about a French artist; I’m gonna go live in Paris and research. That was the spring of 2020. Challenge: instant. In 2020, obviously I didn’t go anywhere, and it’s incredible what you can do online, actually.

The pandemic was a challenge, but what’s also a challenge with someone like Labille-Guiard is that she didn’t leave very much written behind. Élizabeth Vigée Le Brun published a three-volume memoir in her eighties. Labille-Guiard died in her early fifties, and there is very little written by her. There’s this sense in history—you have to have the documents. But that’s not always possible. How was I going to penetrate her life if there weren’t enough written sources?

Rail: Why didn’t she leave written materials?

Quinn: She grew up in Paris, so—although it is a kind of art form, and certainly a literary form in the eighteenth century—she’s not sending letters farther than within the town itself. I don’t know how thoroughly educated she was. She sometimes says that she’s maybe not so thoroughly educated. Maybe they were destroyed. But I’m guessing that was just not part of her life.

There are some letters and some accounts. There are minutes from Academy meetings, a letter that she wrote to the comte d’Angiviller’s wife to help her in her support against these vitriolic, libelous pamphlets that were being sent out. But there is not some vast correspondence between her and one of her students, or between her and [her husband] François-André Vincent. There is the work itself, and around it, the men around her who are part of the Royal Academy, Vigée Le Brun’s memoirs, etc.

In the back of the 1973 monograph on Labille-Guiard, Anne-Marie Passez published what she could find, sort of tracking her. One of the things I found most interesting was the accounting of her things after her death. But all that there was had already been excavated by Passez, or later Laura Auricchio or Neil Jeffares online. I did not discover or uncover any new piece of evidence. I built on what had been done by excellent scholars, and I tried to find her grave.

Rail: What did you add to this research?

Quinn: The new piece I bring to the story is an insight, not a discovery. I’ve lived with her story since my early twenties. I’ve always had certain questions that, over time and with different research (in the archives of the Louvre) by other scholars, I started to piece together. Something I always wondered was: She got married when she was twenty and she was separated eight years later from her husband. But there’s no child, no feeling that maybe she had a secret pregnancy, and then she’s linked romantically to François-André Vincent for decades. But again, no child, no pregnancy that we know of, and I always thought—that’s so weird.

I actually did a lot of research early on, on birth control and abortion in eighteenth-century France. But the longer I looked at things, I was like, “this is not adding up.” One thing I always couldn’t understand was, why did she and Vincent wait until 1800 to get married? At some point I thought: she was Catholic and maybe it wasn’t enough to be divorced from Louis Nicolas Guiard; maybe he had to be dead before she could marry. Although she’s marrying a Protestant, so I don’t know. The point is that divorce is legalized in 1792. She gets divorced, but she and Vincent do not get married until 1800. Why is that?

The more I looked the more I saw—there’s a lot of really weird things here. For example, after they get married they didn’t live together. She lives, instead, with her student Marie-Gabrielle Capet, who she’s lived with for decades. They remain in their own apartment in the Louvre and Vincent remains in his. When the Louvre is closed to artists and the Institut de France opens, where women artists are not admitted, she and Capet move in with Vincent. Then I found this footnote somewhere explaining the living arrangements there—Capet and Labille-Guiard share an upstairs apartment that communicates via a stairway with Vincent’s apartment.

And all of this, to me, suggests that all three are gay. The hopeful part of the story is actually that this is a queer family arrangement and that they loved each other and supported each other. But I don’t think there’s any evidence. People always want evidence for people being gay in the past, but there’s no evidence that Labille-Guiard was straight. Zero. A lot of circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise.

Vincent also never does any drawings of Labille-Guiard. He married her with a guarantee that it wouldn’t be a long marriage (he married her three years before she died, when she was already ill), and it would be a way to protect her partner, Capet. When Labille-Guiard dies, Vincent gets all her things and Capet can continue to live with him as a sort of father figure. Capet stays in the lodgings that she’d been living in, stays with all the material possessions that she had basically her entire adult life, alongside Labille-Guiard, until Vincent dies. And when he dies, that’s when she’s on the street. She lives alone for the first time and dies not long after.

Rail: This reminds me a little of the story of Rosa Bonheur and her companion, Anna Klumpke.

Quinn: It's a tale as old as time, really. How do you negotiate the strictures of society in a way that is appropriate but live the life that you want to have? That’s the insight that I’m willing to vocalize, that I bring to the story. Otherwise, I’m really collecting and highlighting the work of previous scholars, and explaining it as an entire picture.

Rail: This is your third book on historic women. What have you found to be the challenges of writing biographies on these women?

Quinn: I think the biggest challenge is not writing it, it’s getting it published. How do you convince a publisher that this story matters, or that people will buy it? That it has cultural cachet or cultural energy. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—the general public doesn’t know this name and so they’re not going to buy this book and there’s no book written about them, and there’s a fiftieth book written about Leonardo da Vinci and a hundredth book about Manet, or whatever it is.

So how do you break through and say: this person matters, their story matters, their art matters? It’s a problem of the marketplace in many ways. I’m telling a story to engage the imagination to get people to care, because that’s what is required to sell women’s stories. It’s a problem that art historians around women’s art really struggle with, because you don’t want their work to constantly be reduced to biography. But I would just put out there that it’s the same for van Gogh, for Gauguin, for many artists that is the case. Even Leonardo. Until there is parity in the marketplace of ideas, biography is one of the ways to tempt the reader and viewer. But it’s a slippery slope.

Rail: How can we get more stories of women artists to the general public?

Quinn: I have a female agent, I met a female editor, my mentors are women writers who nourished me and passed me along to people I needed to talk to. It’s because of a community of women that I had the opportunity.

I think things are changing. Katy Hessel’s book is gigantic, The Story of Art Without Men (2022). Already people are getting annoyed by books like my book Broad Strokes. That’s great! They’re annoyed for the right reasons, because women are being sectioned off and held up against each other and taken out of the history of art.

There is so much richness to be found and uncovered. The great thing about art is that it doesn’t lie. If you can find the reason it was made, you know the answer. We live in a very visual era, and more and more I think that is the way we should be looking at the past. What do we know from what we see?

Rail: What should artists do to make it easier to keep telling their stories?

Quinn: I think the most important thing for any artist, anywhere, of any kind, is to keep doing their work. That’s how the story is made. Keep at it. And don’t throw anything away!

Even if you don’t think your work matters in this moment, trust in what you have created. Keep track of it, keep tabs on it, keep records on it.

As a writer, I know, don’t throw anything away! I still use things I wrote thirty years ago. I’ll suddenly come across something and think, “Oh there’s something there, I’m glad I have that!” Nothing, nothing, nothing is wasted.