Cover: Louise Moillon, Basket of Plums with Small Basket of Raspberries, date unknown, oil on panel, Grand Rapids, Michigan, CC0.
I was given a free copy of this book to review. Click here for the full disclosure.
Louise Moillon, an upcoming book by Lesley Stevenson, concerns a 17th-century French painter with a short yet intriguing career. Moillon’s still life paintings, which feature ordinary fruits and vegetables in lush, sensuous detail, now appear in major American and European museums. There’s evidence that Moillon (1609/10-1696) was a masterful and well-regarded painter from a very young age, though the scarcity of solid information about her makes it difficult to get any real sense of her personality or life story. This is the first English-language scholarly monograph about her.
A thoughtful approach
Louise Moillon isn’t a biography. Instead, it’s an in-depth consideration of her art and broader issues related to it. These include Moillon’s place within the evolving still life painting tradition, the Protestant artistic milieu that she belonged to in Paris, and changes to the French art world wrought by the establishment of the Academie Royale in 1648. I greatly enjoyed all this learned and thoughtful academic analysis.
The book also addresses a particularly burning question – why none of Moillon’s surviving paintings date after 1640. The fact that Moillon married in that same year makes it easy to assume that she stopped painting because of her marriage. However, Stevenson is clearly not keen on that explanation and proposes several others. When discussing the sparse details of Moillon’s life, I appreciate that the author confidently points out where prior writings and suppositions about the artist seem flawed. I also found it refreshing every time she reminded us that the broad strokes with which we often paint the lives of historical women aren’t necessarily accurate for every time, place, and situation.
That said, I did not necessarily find every one of the book’s arguments to be fully convincing. Stevenson occasionally (and accurately) identifies holes in others’ reasoning but then proposes alternatives with similar shortcomings. She also tends to set up dichotomies between Moillon’s work and that of her peers that seem unrealistically rigid to me. All the same, I found the text to be enlightening and thought-provoking, making it well worth the read even when I didn’t completely agree with it. Thus, I recommend the book to readers interested in historical female artists and comfortable with a more scholarly (though still very readable) approach.
Details
Louise Moillon, which is part of the Illuminating Women Artists series, will be published by Lund Humphries and Getty Publications in April 2024. Thanks so much to Lund Humphries for allowing me the opportunity to read and review this book ahead of its release. The book is 112 pages and includes 40 color illustrations of paintings by Moillon and related works by other artists. Visit the Lund Humphries website to learn more and to pre-order.
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