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Self-Portrait with Two Pupils
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard · Rococo & Neoclassicism
- Artist
- Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803)
- Date
- 1785
- Dimensions
- 210.8 x 151.1 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States
This large self-portrait shows Adélaïde Labille-Guiard seated at her easel in a magnificent blue-grey silk gown and a hat decorated with feathers, brush in hand, while two young women, her pupils, stand behind her watching.
A closer look
Painted two years after she was admitted to the Royal Academy, one of only four women allowed at the time, the picture is both a fashionable portrait and a manifesto. It displays the artist's skill in rendering silk, lace and straw, but also her role as a teacher, at a moment when the Academy refused to let women train in its schools. Her pupils, Marie-Gabrielle Capet and Marie-Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond, gaze admiringly at her canvas. Behind them stands a bust of her father and a classical statue of a Vestal virgin.
More by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
Famous works elsewhere
- Madame de Selve faisant de la musique 1787
- Madame Élisabeth de France (1764–1794) 1787
- Portrait of Elisabeth of France, Duchess of Parma (1727-1759) 1788
- Portrait of Marie-Aurore de Saxe in Diana the Huntress 1777
- Elisabeth-Philippe-Marie-Hélène of France, known as Madame Elisabeth (1764-1794) 1788
- Head of a Young Woman 1779