A Game of Puppets
Antoinette-Cecile-Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot
Details
- Artist
- Antoinette-Cecile-Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot
- Title
- A Game of Puppets
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Size
- 32.5 x 25 cm
- Details
signed middle left: H Lescot
Exhibited
Probably, Paris Salon, 1819 as Un petit joueur de marionnettes
Further Information
Parisian born, Haudebourt-Lescot began studies with Guillaume Guillon-Lethiere, a popular history painter and family friend, at the age of seven. When in 1807 he was appointed director of the French Academy, Rome, she followed him, arriving in 1808 and remaining there until 1816. A painter of genre subjects, she depicted the customs and colourful costumes of Italian peasants in great detail, a popular subject of the time symbolising a time of past innocence amid the growing industrialisation. Such foreign experience was rare for a woman artist, and in uenced much of her work. Far from copying Italian masterworks, many of her paintings depicted the daily life of women.
Her work was received with acclaim, she regularly exhibited her work at the Paris Salon, showing some 110 paintings there between 1811 and 1840, and engravings of her work enhanced her popularity. She was appointed painter to the Duchesse de Berry, and she received several commissions from the French government for the museum at Versailles, and was the only female artist included in François Joseph Heim’s monumental depiction of Charles X awarding medals to artists for the Salon of 1824.