The Artist: Most of what is known about the artistic accomplishments of Charlotte Eustache Sophie de Fuligny-Damas, marquise de Grollier, comes from an obituary published by the botanist and sometime politician Etienne Soulange Bodin in the
Annales de la société d’horticulture of 1828.[1] In addition, there is a small body of paintings, almost entirely descended for two centuries within her family, and lively discussion of her work in letters and journals by leading artistic figures from the 1770s through 1820s who praised her still-life paintings. The sculptor Antonio Canova, who knew Grollier during her exile in Rome following the French Revolution, called her “the Raphael of flower painting.” The leading woman painter of the century, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, recalled that early in her own career she had enjoyed Grollier’s company more than that of anyone in Paris and that Grollier “painted flowers with great superiority,” outshining even those produced by members of the Académie Royale.[2]
Born to Henri Anne de Fuligny-Damas (1669–1745) and Marie Gabrielle de Pons de Rennepont (1711–1778), the artist became a marquise at the age of nineteen with her marriage to Pierre Louis, marquis de Grollier (1730–1793). This aristocratic status prevented Grollier from painting professionally, as several of her female peers did with great success during this period, or from exhibiting her work to any extent. As a result, she has been largely ignored in the history of art. Though many aristocratic women during the early modern period frequently took drawing lessons, they were at pains to make clear this was not for economic gain or attaining a professional identity. In Grollier’s case, it is worth recalling that practicing a trade—which painting remained despite the Académie Royale’s efforts to elevate it to a liberal art—could strip an individual of their noble status.[3]
She should be considered exemplary of a highly specific eighteenth-century phenomenon of the amateur artist, a signification not implying a lack of seriousness or accomplishment, but instead an elevated social standing. As Charlotte Guichard and Perrin Stein have documented, the culture of the amateur was widespread in Paris, notably among male patrons and collectors, who practiced drawing and etching as part of their engagement with the art world and were even made honorary members of the Académie Royale in the specific standing of
amateur honoraire.[4] The circulation of their works took place largely in a mondain culture of gift exchanges as tokens of friendship and to forge intellectual circles. In The Met’s collection, other examples of artworks attesting to this phenomenon by men include the abbé de Saint-Non’s meticulous pastel copy of Jean Honoré Fragonard’s
The Two Sisters (
1977.383;
53.61.5) and etchings by Claude Henri Watelet (
57.602.2) and Anne Claude Philippe de Tubières, the comte de Caylus, notably his remarkable series of cris de Paris etched after Edme Bouchardon (
53.600.588[25]). By the 1770s, models for women amateurs would have been well-known from the highest levels of society, in the practices of Madame la marquise de Pompadour (
24.33[56];
60.622.15), who learned to etch from François Boucher, and Queen Marie Leszcyńska, who learned to paint from Jean-Baptiste Oudry.[5]
Grollier learned to paint from a Dutch émigré artist who enjoyed tremendous success in late eighteenth-century Paris, Gérard van Spaendonck (1746–1822).[6] Van Spaenonck arrived in the city in 1769 and became official miniature painter to Louis XVI in 1774 and a member of the Académie Royale in 1777. Always a specialist of flower painting, in 1780 he succeeded Madeleine Françoise Basseporte as
peintre des plantes du Jardin du Roi (official plant painter to the king). The Jardin du Roi (later called the Jardin des Plantes) was a state-sponsored royal laboratory for the study of botany and medicine. For much of the eighteenth century, it was led by Georges-Louis Leclerc, the comte de Buffon, an enormously influential figure in the natural sciences. During his tenure at the Jardin du Roi, Van Spaendonck took on a significant number of male and female students, many of whom came to specialize in botanical illustration, including Pierre-Joseph Redouté (
2015.604.1) and Henriette Vincent. Grollier regularly signed her own works with variations on “élève de Van Spaendonck” (student of Van Spaendonck), and evidence of her self-proclaimed, transparent indebtedness to him are legion: though she was never an academician, in November 1781, the Académie Royale permitted Grollier to take home Van Spaendonk’s reception piece to copy at home, noting her “zeal for the Arts”[7]; in 1783, Pahin de la Blancherie listed her collection, along with that of fellow amateur Watelet, as one in which Van Spandoenk’s work could be seen in Paris [8]; and, in a still life by Grollier dated to the 1780s, she depicted a wreath of flowers, palette, and brushes, evidently in homage to her teacher (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).[9]
The height of Grollier’s activity as a painter appears to date from the early 1780s until the French Revolution, when her husband was guillotined on December 26, 1793. During the pre-Revolutionary period, Grollier moved in high social circles and had apartments adjacent to those of Queen Marie Antoinette in the Tuileries Palace. This space included a small garden, used to facilitate her art, and Grollier eventually created of a second, larger garden at the base of the Pavilion de Flore, positioned at the end of the Louvre, beside the Tuileries. She also established what seems to have been a fashionable, English-inspired garden at a much larger scale, in the picturesque mode at the château she shared with her husband near Vaucluse. She was said to have had the property’s hills leveled and rivers rerouted to create an idyllic setting that the artists Hubert Robert, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, and Van Spaendoenk “were pleased to decorate with their masterpieces.”[10] She was close enough to Robert to have received from him a chimney cover with a subject typical of this refined world’s sociability: it depicts a country house aflame in which servants try to save the furnishings, having first prioritized a large floral still life by Grollier. Robert noted that a simple frame would allow her to hang it as an easel painting during the winter months.[11]
A small ivory portrait signed by Grollier representing Louis-Charles de France, son of Louis XVI, documents her strong royalist sympathies. Dated 1793, the year in which Grollier’s husband and Louis XVI were guillotined, it depicts the boy wearing the French crown, promoting him as the heir to the Bourbon dynasty.[12] During her exile from France, which probably began that same year, Grollier traveling through Switzerland, Germany, Florence, and Rome, where she learned the art of mosaic. She spent most of this period with Alexandre Charles Emmanuel de Crussol-Florensac (1743–1815). The two appear to have initiated a lifelong companionship some time before the death of Grollier’s husband. In 1787, Vigée Lebrun painted a spirited portrait of Crussol, today in The Met (
49.7.53), that is among the portraitist’s most exceptional works; in 1788, Grollier commissioned Vigée Lebrun for a portrait of herself, seated at an easel painting a still life (private collection; see fig. 1 above).[13] Both of Vigée Lebrun’s portraits are painted on wood, they are similarly scaled, and they remained together in Grollier’s collection until her death.
According to Bodin’s obituary, Grollier was recalled from exile by Joseph-Marie Vien and members of the Académie Royale: “The members of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, headed by the famous Vien, asked for her return from the head of government, which granted their wish as she was one of the supports of national glory.”[14] Grollier and Crussol settled in a château in Épinay–sur–Seine, between Saint Denis and Argenteuil, about eight miles from the center of Paris. Though she seems to have practiced painting less regularly, if at all, and contemporaries noted her failing eyesight, during her final years Grollier transformed the château’s gardens through large-scale feats of engineering and waterworks. She engaged Louis Étienne Héricart de Thury, who recalled her decision to create a lake and move entire islands, including their trees and plantings, to better suit her plan.[15] In her memoires, Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis, recounted that in the early nineteenth century, Grollier received the celebrated German explorer Alexander von Humbolt at Épinay–sur–Seine and animated her gardens for him with actors in a theatrical showing meant to allude to his exploration of the Americas.[16] A poem by Grollier dated 1818 and published by François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, praised her friendship with Humboldt. A footnote indicates that the original manuscript that Chateaubriand consulted, now evidently lost, was ornamented with her drawings of flowers.[17]
During her final decade, based at Épinay-sur-Seine, Grollier also rerouted water sources, establishing fresh drinking water for the town. During this time, though she evidently painted less if at all, she appears to have continued to gift paintings to those in her circle. Her neighbor, the art patron Giovanni Battista Sommariva, whom she perhaps first knew in the circle of Canova in Rome, owned a painting by Grollier that was presumably a gift. In a remarkable “Catalogue pittoresque du cabinet de tableaux de Monsieur le comte de Sommariva,” written by the comtesse de Genlis as a fictional dialogue exploring the collection, a woman laments that this collection lacks a painting by Grollier. She is then corrected by her partner, for not only did he have a small work by her, but he had valued it so highly that he had it copied in enamel and mosaic to better preserve the image. Grollier and Sommavira’s relationship was deeply tied to their shared patronage of contemporary art. In 1819, Grollier gifted Sommariva an ideal female head that she had expressly commissioned for him from Canova.[18] In addition to the painting by Grollier in Sommariva’s collection, at least two other early instances are known of works that, exceptionally, left her own possession and did not descend in her family. These are both documented late in her life: in the collection of Hélène, comtesse de Choiseul–Gouffier, who wrote of it as a gift from Grollier, and in the collection of Napoleon’s first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, a great enthusiast of botanical art, whose posthumous inventory documents a painting by Grollier depicting fruit and a basket of flowers hung in the gallery at the château de Malmaison.[19]
The Painting: One of Grollier’s earliest dated works, this painting attests to her close alliance with her teacher, Gérard van Spaendonck. Signed “Marquise de Grollier, student of Van Spaendonck,” it meticulously follows a still life that he had painted a year before, in 1779.[20] This successful exercise was a preamble to the Académie Royale’s exceptional decision in November 1781 to grant Grollier permission to take home and copy Van Spaendonck’s reception piece, then owned by the Académie, as part of her training.[21] The subtly complex composition allowed Grollier to work through a number of technical challenges that would serve her as she mastered the genre of still life: it juxtaposes a series of textures—a cantaloupe’s viscid interior and craggy exterior, fuzzy peaches, and the sharpness of a cut glass vase—and tensions—a pair of flies explore the cantaloupe, which has been quartered in such a way that it is held together only by its stringy interior and uncut portion of rind. The painting’s overall surface further attests to Grollier’s successful emulation of her teacher on a technical level: a hard, Neoclassical finish balanced with a warm luminosity achieved through carefully applied glazes were features that set Van Spaendonck apart from his Parisian contemporaries.
Grollier’s still life makes an instructive pairing with The Met’s
Vase of Flowers and Conch Shell (1780;
07.225.504), painted the same year by the period’s leading still-life painter, Anne Vallayer-Coster, who had been a well-regarded member of the Académie Royale since 1770. Vallayer-Coster was a favorite of Marie Antoinette; her works were praised at the Salon and would have been highly familiar to Grollier as she built her confidence as a painter in her own right. Both paintings are relatively modest in scale and they share complementary formal features including Vallayer-Coster’s ormolu-mounted porcelain, which is comparable with the ormolu-mounted glass, and Vallayer-Coster’s conch shell, which serves a similar visual role to the split cantaloupe. Differences between these paintings and how they were viewed and produced are also insightful. Even once Grollier attained greater independence from Van Spaendonck, her paintings were not shown publicly, while Vallayer-Coster’s work was part of the Salon of 1781. While Grollier immediately adopted the hard Neoclassical surface of her teacher, Vallayer-Coster would not adopt aspects of this technique until several years later as it became increasingly typical of Neoclassical still-life painting. Concerns relevant to both works, including the relationship of women painters to professionalization and genre hierarchies, are explored in The Met’s
Interior of an Atelier of a Woman Painter (1789;
57.103) by Marie Victorine Lemoine, who pointedly contrasts a history painting with a still life. It signals not only Lemoine’s proficiency in still life, the genre most associated with women, but also her ability to transcend it to a more academically elevated subject matter.
David Pullins 2022
[1] Key sources on Grollier’s life are Etienne Soulange Bodin, “Notice sur Madame la marquise de Grollier,”
Annales de la société d’horticulture de Paris (December 1828), pp. 1–7 and Damian 2018 (see Refs).
[2] Bodin 1828, citing Canova, p. 4; Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun,
Souvenirs de madame Louis-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Paris, 1835, pp. 276–78.
[3] William H. Sewell, Jr.,
Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848, Cambridge, 1980, p. 21.
[4] Charlotte Guichard,
Les amateurs d’art à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Seyssel, 2008; Perrin Stein,
Artists and Amateurs: Etching in 18th-Century France, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013.
[5] See particularly, Pascal Torres Guardiola, “Remarques sur la Suite d’estampes gravées par Madame la marquise de Pompadour d’après les pierres gravées par Jacques Guay” in Xavier Salmon,
Madame de Pompadour et les Arts, exh. cat., Réunion des Museés Nationaux, Paris, 2002, pp. 215–36, and Susan M. Wager, “The Earliest Known Version of Madame de Pompadour’s ‘Suite d’Estampes’ Rediscovered,”
Burlington Magazine, 159 (April 2017), pp. 285–89; Xavier Salmon,
Parler à l’âme et au cœur: La peinture selon Marie Leszczyńska, exh. cat., château de Fontainebleau, Paris, 2011, pp. 84–103.
[6] On Van Spaendonck see Margriet van Boven and Sam Segal,
Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck: Twee Brabantse bloemenschilders in Parijs, Maarssen, 1981; Paul Huys Janseen,
De geur van succes: Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck: bloemschilders in Parijs, exh. cat., Het Hoordbrabants Museum, Zwolle, 2019.
[7] “Madame la Marquise de Grollier ayant fait demander à la Compagnie le tableau de reception de M. Van Spaendonck à l’effect d’en achever la copie, déjà commencée par elle, l’Académie, se prêtant volontiers au désir de Madame la Marquise de Grollier et à son zèle pour les Arts, a permis que ledit tableau soit déplacé des salles et confié à Madame la Marquise, aux conditions qu’elle en donnera, comme il est d’usage, un récépissé a M. Pajou, Trésorier.”
Anatole de Montaiglon, Procès–verbaux de l’Académie royale de peinture et sculpture, 1648–1792, Paris, 1875–1892, vol. 9, 87.
[8] Pahin de la Blancherie,
Essai d’un tableau historique des peintres de l’école françoise…, Paris, 1783, p. 243.
[9] Its role as a homage would be more certain, however, had it been gifted to her teacher; rather, it descended in her family until its sale to LACMA in 1996. Many thanks to Leah Lembeck for providing provenance and inscription information. No works by Grollier appear in Van Spaendonck’s posthumous sale, held June 15, 1822 (Lugt 10297). On the paintings in Van Spaendonck’s collection as evidence of social networks that secured his professional position in Paris, see Mayken Jonkman, “‘Mille compliments et amitiés’: Friendships in the Making of Gerard van Spaendonck’s Parisian Career,”
Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek, 70 (2020), pp. 336–61.
[10] Bodin 1828, p. 4.
[11] Robert’s painting sold June 8, 1972, no. 14; See Damian 2018, pp. 8–9.
[12] Sold Drouot, Paris, October 9, 2019, no. 313.
[13] Katharine Baetjer,
French Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Early Eighteenth Century through the Revolution, New York, 2019, pp. 341–44, no. 114; Damian 2018, pp. 2–7.
[14] Bodin 1828, p. 5.
[15] Bodin 1828, p. 7; Louis Etienne Héricart de Thury,
Considerations géologiques et physiques sur la cause de jaillissement des eaux des puits forés ou fontaines artificiales, Bordeaux, 1829, p. 36.
[16] François Barrière,
Mémoires de Madame de Genlis, Paris, 1857, pp. 400–402.
[17] “Vers écrits sur un Souvenir donnée par la marquise de Grollier à M. le baron de Humboldt” in
Œuvres completes de M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Paris, 1828, vol. 22, p. 574
[18] Stéphanie-Félicité Du Crest, comtesse de Genlis, “Catalogue pittoresque du cabinet de tableaux de Monsieur le comte de Sommariva (1820)” in
Plumes et Pinceaux: Discours de Femmes sur l’Art en Europe (1750–1850)– Anthologie, ed. Anne Lafont, Paris, 2012, pp. 3–14. It is unclear where this work is today. On the Canova bust, see Leopoldo Cicognara,
Antonio Canova in Sculpture and Modelling, Boston, 1876, vol. 1, p. 5.
[19] Hélène de Choiseul,
Jeanne-d’Arc: Poëme, Paris, 1828, p. 467; Getty Provenance Index, citing Archival Inventory F_243 (June 8, 1814), no. 139, “Corbeille de fleurs et fruits posés sur une table,” valued at 50 fr.
[20] Edwina van Heek Collection, Singraven Estate, Noordoost Twente, The Netherlands. Van Boven and Segal 1981, p. 100.
[21] See biographical notice above.
