Portrait of Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt (1762−1817)
Gilles Louis Chrétien French
After Jean Fouquet French
Not on view
Théroigne was a Belgian proto-feminist revolutionary who moved to Versailles in the summer of 1789 in order to attend the debates at the National Assembly. She advocated for the participation of women in revolutionary clubs and authored a pamphlet urging the election of women representatives. She was known to dress in a masculine manner, as seen here in a physionotrace produced by Chrétien and Fouquet. Chrétien invented the physionotrace—the name of both the method and the resulting image—to aid his production of silhouette portraits. Fouquet completed the portraits from life and Chrétien scaled them down to the etching plate; both artists used pantographs, devices that link the movement of one instrument to that of another.
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