Ad?la?de Labille-Guiard

(b Paris, 11 April 1749; d Paris, 24 April 1803). French painter. Her father, Claude Labille (1705-88), was a haberdasher in Paris. She first trained (c. 1763) with the miniature painter Fran?ois-Elie Vincent (1708-90), whose studio was next door to her father's shop. By 1769 she had obtained membership in the Acad?mie de St Luc, no doubt sponsored by Vincent, who was Conseiller to this Acad?mie. In that year she married Louis-Nicolas Guiard, a financial clerk; the marriage was childless. In 1779 she obtained a legal separation from her husband. For some time between 1769 and 1774 she studied the technique of pastel with Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. She first exhibited her work at the Acad?mie de St Luc in 1774, when she showed a life-size pastel Portrait of a Magistrate (untraced; see Passez, no. 1) and a Self-portrait in miniature (untraced; P 2). With the ambition of eventually becoming a member of the Acad?mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, she entered in 1776 the studio of her childhood friend Fran?ois-Andr? Vincent, in order to learn oil painting, a technique she had mastered by c. 1780. Following the suppression of the Acad?mie de St Luc in 1776, artists who were not members of the Acad?mie Royale had no venue in which to exhibit until the establishment of the Salon de la Correspondance in 1781. There Labille-Guiard exhibited in 1782 and 1783 a series of artists' portraits in pastel. Her subjects included leading members of the Acad?mie Royale, such as Joseph-Marie Vien (1782; Montpellier, Mus. Fabre), from whom she had requested sittings as a means of developing her professional connections and demonstrating her talent. By then she had made her own studio and by 1783 had been teaching nine women students. In that year she was admitted to full membership of the Acad?mie Royale, on the same day as Elisabeth-Louise Vig?e Le Brun.

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