The Visual Culture of Fashion and the Classical Ideal in Post-Revolutionary France

In her little-known painting A Study of a Woman after Nature (1802), Marie-Denise Villers exploited a conjuncture between masculine-inflected ideals of Neoclassical art and feminine-inflected ideas of fashionability in the post-Revolutionary period in France by making a feature of female dress while emulating the standards of history painting. The artist's confident synthesis of idioms is examined in the context of Albertine Clement-Hemery's memoir of a women's art studio. Walter Benjamin's notion of gestus is enlisted as a means of understanding how the quite different image cultures invoked in this work communicated social ideas.