Fig. 1 Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette in a Park, ca. 1780–81. Black, stumped, and white chalk on blue paper, 58.9 × 40.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2019.138.4.
Fig. 2 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Study of a Seated Woman Seen from Behind (Marie-Gabrielle Capet), 1789. Red, black, and white chalk on toned laid paper, 52 x 48 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2008.538.1.
Fig. 2 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Study of a Seated Woman Seen from Behind (Marie-Gabrielle Capet), 1789. Red, black, and white chalk on toned laid paper, 52 x 48 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2008.538.1.
I thought of these two portraits, and the radically different social dynamics that informed them, as I watched Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu; 2019). Sciamma’s critically-lauded film sketches the relationship between fictional late-eighteenth-century portraitist, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her recalcitrant subject, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) [3]. Marianne, an aspiring Parisian academiècienne, has been commissioned by Héloïse’s mother, to paint a portrait of her daughter; the likeness is to be sent to Héloïse’s betrothed in Milan. (Of course, by traditional art historical standards, this is an utterly common, uninteresting project: an unknown, minor female artist painting a marginal aristocratic portrait intended for matrimonial barter, rather than public display.)
Only after she has arrived at the remote château, situated on an island off the coast of Brittany, does Marianne learn that she has been hired to succeed where another, anonymous male artist failed. Héloïse refuses to sit for her portrait, so profoundly does she resent her forced engagement. Marianne soon discovers her predecessor’s abandoned canvas, with the sitter’s face left unfinished; Marianne (accidentally, but no less satisfactorily) destroys his work with the errant flame of a candle.
In order to complete this commission, Marianne furtively observes Héloïse during the day, under the pretense of serving as a walking companion, and paints furiously at night. We, with Marianne, follow a few steps behind Héloïse as she furiously paces chalky cliffs and abandoned beaches; we study the curve of her ear, the contour of her cheek, and her alluring scowl. Héloïse’s fierce eyes, however, prove impossible to capture in paint. Frustrated, Marianne secretly dons her subject’s green silk robe à la francaise and observes her own figure in a mirror—as if she could embody her subject, and thereby come to understand her.
When she is confronted by Héloïse, Marianne is forced to reveal her true purpose, and she proceeds with the project with Héloïse’s consent. What results is an artistic collaboration, in which Marianne is forced to reconcile her artistic training, with Héloïse’s own ideas about a portrait, and marriage, that she doesn’t want. Marianne initially insists upon the rules and conventions, that structure traditional portraiture—no doubt a reference to the academic tenets that informed her education, and a not-too-subtle metaphor for the social structures that define the lives of both women. Héloïse counters that the portrait ought capture her presence, her substance—but above all, her anger, which practically broils beneath the porcelain surface of her skin.
These collaborative painting scenes are nearly as intoxicating than the erotic moments that follow. In the opening scenes, Sciamma had established the unwieldiness of Marianne’s supplies, packed into a wooden crate and lugged onto the island by boat. Then, in a series of close-up shots, she evokes the slow, painstaking work of making a portrait, emphasizing the materiality of paint and canvas. We see Marianne mixing a range of pigments, priming the surface, sketching the infrastructure of the figure and face, and carefully constructing flesh with layers of white, pink, and peach paint [4]. (However lovely these sequences, the film is rendered less convincing by the jarring photorealism of the resulting portrait, which looks more like a Nancy Reagan’s White House portrait than anything produced in France during the eighteenth-century.)
Frustratingly, the film also relies upon several feminist art historical truisms. Marianne explains to Héloïse that she earned the commission through her father, with whom she trained—a recurring motif in biographical narratives of many female artists, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Vigée Le Brun. Despite the professional opportunity afforded her, Marianne wryly asserts that she is prevented from making “great” art, because she is unable to study and paint the male nude. (The audience with which I saw the film, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, chuckled knowingly in response--evidence of the pervasiveness of Linda Nochlin’s argument in that infamous essay [5]). We also learn that, later in her career, Marianne becomes a teacher of aspiring female artists—much like Labille-Guiard, who trained many younger artists who were unable to enter the Academy by virtue of their sex [6].
These few platitudes aside, the film very subtly documents the evolution of Marianne’s visual attention to her subject, from formal interest to fascination to desire. Though the plot primarily emerges from Marianne’s perspective, the romance between Marianne and Héloïse ignites through the friction of their mutual gazes. (For several film scholars, this mutuality distinguishes the lesbian gaze from the male gaze; as Chris Straayer has written, “the lesbian look...requires exchange. It looks for a returning look, not just a receiving look. It sets up two-directional sexual activity.") [7] Those exchanges—tentative at first, but increasingly bold—climax in a scintillating scene in which Héloïse encourages Marianne to sketch a nude self-portrait. Observing herself in a hand mirror balanced between Heloise’s bare legs, Marianne sketches her own likeness on the margins of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; indeed, she has begun to see herself in an entirely new way. too.
The intensity of the lovers’ connection is heightened by their seclusion on the island, far from Marianne’s professional life in Paris and Héloïse’s fated matrimony in Milan. Though their lives have heretofore been defined by the patriarchal, heterosexist power structures, men remain largely unseen, unheard, and unnamed in the film. Together with Héloïse’s young maid, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami, who looks as if she has emerged directly from a Chardin genre painting (Fig. 3). Héloïse and Marianne forge a kind of matriarchal enclave, occupying themselves by painting, reading, cooking, singing, drinking, and lovemaking. For Héloïse, this recalls her formative years spent in a Benedictine convent—where at least, she remarks, one was relatively free to read and to make music [8]. The trio’s newfound happiness is only interrupted when Sophie realizes, unhappily, that she is pregnant. Without mentioning the father or the nature of the encounter that resulted in the pregnancy, Sophie expresses fear, primarily for her job, and seeks in abortion in a nearby village [9]. This viscerally painful experience, improbably, becomes the subject of another proto-feminist oil study by Marianne.
However blissful, Héloïse and Marianne’s affair is short-lived. The ephemerality and the unspoken dangerousness of their relationship is emphasized through the recurring references to Orpheus and Eurydice from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The myth describes the transitory nature of life and love, as well as the fraught consequences of a gaze. Orpheus is able to lead his dead wife, Eurydice, out of the netherworld, so long as he does not turn back to look at her; inevitably, he does. Discussing the narrative with Héloïse, Marianne muses that this was perhaps a poetic gesture, rather than a moral failing; Orpheus chose the visual memory of Eurydice, rather than attempting to physically hold on to her. Héloïse counters that Eurydice may have asked him to turn around to see her one last time. This interpretation resurfaces during their final exchange, in which Héloïse implores Marianne to turn around and look at her once more—an expression of both love and individual agency, as she invites her artist-lover’s gaze.
The film should have ended with this poignant rupture; but Sciamma was unable to resist a postscript. Two subsequent encounters include an utterly unconvincing rendering of the Parisian Salon, the attendees of which seem far too clean and well-behaved. Indeed, the sets and costumes of Portrait of a Lady on Fire form a sharp contrast to other films about late eighteenth-century French women--notably, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), an opulent glut of sugar and silk set against a 1980s pop rock soundtrack. This is a quieter, more austere and insular world, evidently constructed with a much lower film budget: the large but plain house is dusty and largely uninhabited, the beach deserted, the village sparsely populated.
Still, this film is gorgeous, rich with salt water, sand, charcoal, paint—and above all fire, the presence of which signals crucial plot turns. Long after leaving the theater, I was left with the memory of two striking shots, in particular. On Marianne’s first night at the château, we see her sitting alone in front of a fireplace flanked by two blank canvases. Entirely nude, silhouetted by the flame, Marianne looks utterly liberated as she contemplates the creative project before her. The other scene takes place near the conclusion of the affair, when Héloïse and Marianne attend a bonfire on the beach. Marianne watches, mesmerized, as the hem of Héloïse’s dress catches fire, her face alive with wanting.
Indeed, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is equally radical in its representation of passion and platonic tenderness, resistance and resignation. This freedom is perhaps only possible with non-royal, fictional subjects; still, art historians would do well to similarly invoke the pleasures and pains, as well as the fires, that informed the lives and work of real women artists and their subjects.
[1] On the relationship between Vigee Le Brun and Marie Antoinette, see Mary D. Sheriff,The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 161-169 and Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France, exhib. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), 86-89, 120-123, and 132-133. On Labille-Guiard and Capet, see Laura Auricchio, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009), 42-44 and 104-109.
[2] Both drawings are part of the exceptional bequest of another remarkable female patron, Jayne Wrightsman, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Everrett Fahy, ed., The Wrightsman Pictures (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 252-254 and 265-267.
[3] Though Portrait of a Lady of Fire was passed over for the French entry to the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, the film won the Best Screenplay Award and the Queer Palm prize at the Cannes Film Festive in May 2019 [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8613070/awards.]
[4] All of the canvases in the film, as well as the hands pictured painting and sketching, are those of artist Hélène Delmaire. Christopher L. Iona, “The Artist Behind the Paintings At the Heart of ‘Portrait of a Lady On Fire’,” Garage Magazine (November 24, 2019) [https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/7x5nb4/the-artist-behind-the-portraits-at-the-heart-of-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire].
[5] Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Art News 69 (January 1971), 23-71.
[6] Auricchio, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, 40-44.
[7] See Chris Straayer, “The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine," Jump Cut, no. 35, April 1990, pp. 50-57 and Karen Hollinger, "Theorizing Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular Lesbian Film." Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (1998): 3-17.
[8] On the varied experiences of cloistered life in eighteenth-century France, see Mita Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
[9] On the fear of pregnancy among single, working-class women in particular, see Christine Théré, "Women and Birth Control in Eighteenth-Century France." Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 552-64 [www.jstor.org/stable/30053934] and Angus McLaren, Sexuality and Social Order: The Debate over the Fertility of Women and Workers in France, 1770-1920 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983).