Among Ball State Museum's permanent collection of European pictures are two canvases painted by Mademoiselles Le Moine and Befort, ambitious, accomplished women who were fortunate to train privately in Paris at the turn of the eighteenth century. It is significant that each succeeded in producing serious work at a time when their gender was banned from France's national fine arts school and the coveted Rome Prize, a critically-formative scholarship to the French Academy's branch abroad. Despite the odds, both of these artists managed to show their paintings and have their work documented at the Academy's Salon. And at that time there was no more prestigious or influential exhibition venue in the world. Lemoine's portrait captures the shy, tentative sensibility of Baron d'Holbach's young daughter. Although undated, her dress and wistful aura evoke the uncertainty in the social and political climate at end of the Ancien Regime. Also unsigned, this painting was earlier attributed to Vigée-Lebrun but has recently been convincingly reassigned to Marie Victoire Le Moine. Mlle. Befort's imposing yet tender composition of 1809 portrays a devoted daughter comforting her father, who was wounded in battle at the ancient city of Thebes. Few women painters of the period attempted history subjects, which were regarded by academicians and critics as the pinnacle for the Neoclassical style.  Furthermore, the artist's subtle reference to Egypt catered to a vogue that had captivated the fine, decorative, and architectural arts following Napoleon's successful campaign in the mid nineties. Other than her paintings, which were  listed in several of the Salon's printed catalogues and connected her with David's pupil Gioacchin Serangeli, Befort's given name and biographical information have remained a mystery.

Despite concerted, escalating interest in women's studies among art historians, it is frustrating that so much pertinent information about earlier women artists remains elusive. Not only were women banned from many of the prominent schools and associated academies (Angelika Kauffmann, the brilliant Swiss painter and printmaker who became a founding member of the British Royal Academy was an exception), but, because they trained less formally and often within their own families, written records tracing their lives and production may never have existed. This was also the case in the more commercial realm of printmaking, where extended families often built dynasty businesses over several generations, and everyone learned how to pitch-in in a pinch. This exhibition of prints on loan from the Allentown Art Museum augmented by works from Ball State gathers a thought-provoking sampling of thirty engravings, etchings, and lithographs made by nineteen women, all born before 1840. Their work represents six countries and spans three centuries, from the Italian Renaissance through the French Revolution and the Romantic era.  In providing this opportunity to watch gifted artists converse across the centuries through the meeting of their work in Muncie, we hope to inspire further investigation into their ideas, intentions, techniques, and biographies.

According to the ancient Greek myth, the illegitimate birth of the goddess Artemis (the Roman Diana) took place on the isolated Island of Delos. Jealous treachery on the part of her father's first wife detained the midwife, so that Diana's mother, Latona, had to manage a dual delivery alone. Born first and springing immediately into action, the daughter assisted with the birth of her twin brother, Apollo. In 1547, it was this same goddess Diana who provided the namesake for a northern Italian girl child who would grow up to record this tale of feminine determination and cooperation in a masterful engraving. Diana Scultori and her elder brother, Adamo, belonged to and were trained by the premier printmaking family in Mantua, yet only Diana's exceptional skill and accomplishments were immortalized as a "marvel" by Giorgio Vasari in his famous, Renaissance biographical collection, Lives of the Artists. (fig. 00)

Such high tribute was rare for woman artists working prior to the nineteenth century. Nurturers by nature, models of multi-task mentality, how many mothers and wives over the centuries -- Diana Scultori, Catherine Beauvarlet, Anne Allen, or Caroline Lose, for instance -- seamlessly merged their domestic domain with their husbands' printing businesses? How many young daughters like Magdalena Van de Passe, Laura Piranesi, and Marie Neil became equally agile with a burin in hand as with needle and thread, or, like Susanne von Sandrart, pressed inked proofs on dampened rag paper as competently  as she might iron the family linens?  As for the gifted Bouzonnet-Stella girls: how many sisters were capable of immortalizing a brother's painting in a master engraving marketed to kings and collectors, and how many nieces earned the privilege, in the dedications they inscribed on their copper plates, of linking their own names with those of their famous uncle-teacher and other professional intimates of even greater renown? Until modern times, the majority of women engravers worked all too often as silent partners, stepping up to the plate as needed in the family business but seldom leaving evidence of their contributions beyond, perhaps, an elusive, feminine touch with burin or etching needle. It is to those women who did, in fact, mark their professional presence with their signature that we pay tribute in this selection of works by early women printmakers.

While many of the prints on view take their subjects from the classical literature of Greece and Rome, their compositions also encompass all of the academic painting categories: history and religion, genre (scenes of daily life), portraiture, landscape and architectural views, animal painting and still life. Dedications inscribed on the prints often pay homage to male painters of stature (Giulio Romano, Adam Elsheimer, Anthony Van Dyck, Nicolas Poussin, Jean Pillement, Giovanni-Battista Piranesi). Nevertheless, some of the more independent-minded women boldly engraved their own inventions—Angelica Kauffmann, for example, or the notorious Madame de Pompadour, and Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, who, at an unthinkably tender age,  followed her teacher to Rome. Further comparisons and investigation of prints signed by women might seem to suggest that the particular subjects they chose to engrave could also be considered a reflection on examples feminine power in history and mythology. Suzanne von Sandrart more specifically pays tribute to feminine artistic accomplishment in her portrait of a contemporary Italian poetess and painter. From another viewpoint, how interesting it is to observe these printmakers' fascination with depicting their native topographies.  Even in such a small sampling of work, it is possible to trace trends in landscape art from the end of the sixteenth century with Diana Scultori's work in Northern Italy, through seventeenth century studies made in the Netherlands (van de Passe, figs. 00, 00), Germany (Küsel, fig. 00), and France (the Bouzonnet-Stellas, fig. 00). In the romantic era, the picturesque vista of the village of Limberg sketched by Therese de Holbein nods to the time honored hobby of collecting topographical views. Precursors of modern post cards, the trend grew proportionately with the steady rise in international tourist trade. Dresden-born Caroline von Schlieben Lose spent most of her life around Milan, where she teamed with her husband to produce etched outlines of familiar monuments (Umrissradierungen) which were sold to residents and travelers as coloring-book style souvenirs intended to be hand-painted by the recipient. For clients less artistically inclined, there were versions richly finished in the tonal intaglio technique of aquatint, which closely resembled wash drawing. More traditional printed views were produced by Laura Piranesi, who trained and worked in the Roman studio of her famous father at the end of the eighteenth century, and by Gabrielle Marie Niel, who distinguished herself in Paris during the mid-nineteenth century, as the sole student of the celebrated etcher, Charles Meryon.

Some of the more imaginative, fanciful prints in the exhibition have archaeological underpinnings. Many eighteenth-century chinoiserie motifs actually found models in antique Roman wall paintings and served a decorative function in wallpaper, textiles, or furniture design. Anne Allen's ornaments in this style may at first look like delicate embroideries; she painstakingly inked one color at a time on a single copper plate applying a process called à la poupée (carefully directed dabs made with little inky rags called "dolls," fig.00). Allen's exacting technique and Prestel's and Lose's deceptive aquatints attest to the active role women artists played in the eighteenth-century's brilliant inventions of printmaking techniques that could produce convincing, color-printed facsimiles of drawings, watercolors, and pastels. It no doubt would have surprised Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella to see some of her compositions adapted more than a century later on washable, copper plate-printed home furnishing fabrics.

Next to portraits, genre scenes were a lucrative niche for women who supported themselves with their art. Notable in this category are Catherine Beauvarlet's dramatic rendering of a pair of common street venders and Madame Haudebout-Lescot's narrative showing a scribe in a Roman neighborhood taking dictation for a love letter. The artist reproduced the latter to promote one of her own paintings, probably exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1817; her print was made to be included in a publication of lithographs that appeared in 1825. But, the most unusual print in the exhibition is both an important historical document and an intriguing mystery  Not only is it is the earliest illustration we have of the Free Masons' ritual ceremonies, but it also bears the scandalous signatures of two women: a designer identified in the plate only as the "Marquise de***" and an engraver who signs herself simply as "Mademoiselle L." How did a woman infiltrate this traditionally male secret society? Or, perhaps, these spies were really not women, after all?

Starr Siegele
New York
January 28, 2008