CHARPENTIER, Constance - b. 1767 Paris, d. 1849 Paris

French woman painter. She was a pupil of François Gérard and Jacques-Louis David, and in 1788 she received a Prix d’Encouragement. She exhibited at the Salon from 1795 until 1819, when she received a gold medal. Like other female painters of her period, she specialized in sentimental genre scenes and portraits of women and children. Although she was considered by contemporary critics to be one of the finest portrait painters of the age, few works by her have been traced. One of the first known works is Scene of Family Life (1796, private collection), a genre scene closer to Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun than to David. Among her portraits shown in the Salon of 1801 may have been that of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), previously attributed to David, showing a young girl drawing, posed against the sunlight. The painting reflects the influence of Gérard and is close in style to a portrait of Mme Pagniere-Drolling (St Louis, Art Museum).

Melancholy

The toll of young men in the French Revolution, and in the ensuing wars, was immense. While loss afflicted both sexes and all ages, its consequences for women were more practical. Survival and responsibility created new opportunities. While women artists were not a new phenomenon, it was women artists in Paris — some of them associated with David - who found the means to project the grief of an abandoned generation in terms of poetic allegory. But far from asserting independence, their pictures tended to reinforce male stereotypes of female attachment. Epitomized by Melancholy by Constance Charpentier, which appeared in the Salon of 1801 and showed a girl seated alone and despondent in a woody landscape, meditating on her lost loved one, these soulful and sentimental images conveyed a passive devotion. These women seem to have nothing to do but remember; time and emotion are frozen for them.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Vincenzo Bellini: Malinconia, ninfa gentile