New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art sending 65 European masterpieces to Australia in 2021
The portrait of a beautiful young French woman, visiting Australia as part of a major exhibition next year, has thrown out many tempting clues for art historians.
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The portrait of a beautiful young French woman to be unveiled in Australia next year has presented an ongoing mystery for art historians ever since it was privately gifted to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1917.
The 1801 portrait is Marie Josephine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, by Marie Denise Villers. The exquisite work, a crowd favourite ever since it first went on display, will be seen from June to October 2021 in a major exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.
Announced today, European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York will cover 500 years, from a 1420s painting by Fra Angelico to a 1919 Monet water lily painting.
Presented by GOMA and Art Exhibitions Australia, European Masterpieces will feature 65 paintings by artists from the history textbooks — Titian, Raphael, Goya, Vermeer, Rembrandt and many more.
Unlike them, the artist who painted du Val d’Ognes is not well known. Only one other painting by Villers survives.
But the story of her painting at The Met sweeps up everything from revolution to feminism. And its changing attribution from one artist to another has done nothing to dampen the public’s love of seeing it.
When the painting first entered The Met collection it was long believed to be an outstanding picture by the giant of Neoclassical painting, Jacques-Louis David. But in the 1950s, eagle-eyed art expert Charles Sterling spotted the painting in an old engraving that depicted the Salon of 1801. The annual Salon was the most prestigious exhibition in Paris. But it was well known that David had not entered that year.
Out went the attribution to David. And, in accordance with The Met’s curatorial guidelines, so did the identity of the sitter.
Sterling controversially proposed that the picture was really by a barely-known woman painter called Constance Charpentier.
Now that the painting’s association with David was severed, and the artist had turned out to be a woman, the portrait immediately became a feminist icon. It appeared everywhere, including on the cover of Germaine Greer’s 1979 book The Obstacle Race, about the under-representation of women in the annals of art history.
But Sterling’s attribution to Charpentier did not satisfy everyone, and by 1980 The Met no longer claimed to know with any certainty who had done its popular picture. It was renamed Young Woman Drawing.
Then, in 1996, art historian Margaret Oppenheimer — on the basis of a photograph of a lost painting by Villers — declared the picture was by Villers’ hand.
A study for the lost painting turned up a few years later, “and the visual evidence shows very probably the author is Villers”, according to Columbia University art history professor Anne Higonnet.
Higonnet embarked on her own studies. She consulted histories and memoirs and, using a ruler on an old map of Paris, worked out that the portrait was painted inside the Grande Galerie of the Louvre museum itself.
The sitter was, she concluded, probably participating in one of the radical, women-only studios operating inside the Louvre in 1801.
Family letters confirmed that du Val d’Ognes was indeed living in a building on the Quai Malaquais across the Seine from the Louvre, and Higonnet believes it could be the building in the background of the picture.
Villers had studied art under the male painter Anne-Louis Girodet whose own teacher had been David. Higonnet proposes that Villers might even have had some tuition from David himself. It’s a tempting thought.
The painting was held by the du Val d’Ognes family for several generations. It was then sold to Maurice de Rothschild who sold it to New York businessman and philanthropist Isaac Dudley Fletcher, who gave it to The Met.
The Met’s European galleries, where the Villers usually hangs, are awash with natural light from enormous skylights. But the ageing skylights are undergoing complete renewal, forcing The Met to remove the paintings in those galleries. This is why so many of The Met’s most famous works are able to travel to Brisbane.
European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York will be seen only in Brisbane. There are only two female artists in the show — Villers, who died in 1821, and her contemporary Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun.
GOMA director Christopher Saines believes the two women could well have known each other. It’s certainly nice to imagine that they did.
* European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; June 12-October 17, 2021
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Originally published as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art sending 65 European masterpieces to Australia in 2021