Constance Marie Charpentier (1767-1849), Presumed Portrait Of Louis Augustin Avrain

Constance Marie Charpentier (1767-1849) Presumed portrait of Louis Augustin Avrain (vice president of the Niort court) Oil on canvas signed lower left Size: 72 x 59 cm Size with frame: 86.5 x 73.5 cm Provenance: Comes from the family castle of the portrait holder's descendants. Note: Original stretcher and canvas, note an old accident to the left of the ear in the background. Biography: Born Constance-Marie Blondelu on April 4, 1767 in Paris, Constance-Marie Charpentier embodies one of the most remarkable female trajectories in French painting at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Coming from a cultured bourgeois family – her father was a merchant-grocer and her mother from a literary background – she benefited from a very early environment favorable to the blossoming of her talent. At the age of ten, she entered the drawing school founded by the engraver Johann Georg Wille, who quickly recognized in her a natural talent for art. In 1784, she continued her training in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, a central figure of Neoclassicism. Encouraged by her teacher, she hoped to join the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture as a history painter. In 1787, she presented several ambitious large-scale works, including Ulysses Finding Astyanax and Alexander Weeping at the Tomb of Darius's Wife. Despite the quality of her work and David's support, her application was rejected, revealing the persistent obstacles faced by women artists. The French Revolution profoundly changed the artistic landscape: in 1791, the Salon was opened to all artists, academic or not. Constance-Marie Charpentier took advantage of this and exhibited three paintings in 1795, thus asserting her independence. She regularly participated in the Salon until 1819, becoming one of the leading figures in the gradual feminization of the world of painting. Married in 1793 to François-Victor Charpentier, brother-in-law of Georges Danton, she managed to balance family life and an artistic career. Her life was marked by personal trials—the tragic loss of her eldest daughter, then the death of her husband in 1810—but she managed to transform her art into a genuine means of subsistence. A sought-after portraitist, she multiplied her commissions and received an encouragement prize in 1798 for her paintings The Widow for a Day and The Widow for a Year. Her true triumph came at the Salon of 1801 with Melancholy, a painting with a historical subject that blended neoclassical rigor and pre-romantic sensibility. The work, purchased by the state, established her reputation and remains her masterpiece. She continued to exhibit portraits and genre scenes, winning a gold medal at the Salon in 1814 and a silver medal at the Douai Salon in 1821. From the late 1820s, Constance-Marie Charpentier gradually withdrew from the public eye to devote herself to teaching. In her studio on Rue du Pot-de-Fer-Saint-Sulpice, she received young women several times a week who wanted to learn drawing and painting. After a life marked by the Revolution, the Empire, the Restoration, and the July Monarchy, Constance-Marie Charpentier died in Paris on August 2, 1849, at the age of 82. A talented portrait painter, an independent woman, and a figure of perseverance, she remains an example of the place won by women artists in a world that was still largely male-dominated. His work, between classicism and romanticism, bears witness as much to a personal ambition as to a changing era.