17 Facts About Anne Vallayer-Coster

Anne Vallayer-Coster was a major 18th-century French painter best known for still lifes.

Anne Vallayer-Coster achieved fame and recognition very early in her career, being admitted to the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1770, at the age of twenty-six.

Anne Vallayer-Coster survived the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror, but the fall of the French monarchy, who were her primary patrons, caused her reputation to decline.

Anne Vallayer-Coster seems not to have entered the studio of a professional painter, possibly because such an apprenticeship to an unrelated male was difficult for a respectable woman.

Anne Vallayer-Coster was unanimously elected into the Royal Academie once the Academicians saw her paintings, making her one of only fourteen women accepted into the Academie before the French Revolution.

Immediately her mother took over the family business, quite commonly the case during this time, and Anne Vallayer-Coster continued to work to help support her family.

Anne Vallayer-Coster exhibited her first floral still life in 1775, and subsequently became known especially as a painter of flowers.

Anne Vallayer-Coster received early recognition of her career after being elected as an associate and a full member of the Royal Academie in 1770.

Anne Vallayer-Coster was exceptional in achieving membership in the academy and succeeding in a prominent, professional career late in the 18th century, when resistance to women in the public sphere was deepening and the Academie was as resistant as ever to welcoming women into its ranks.

Anne Vallayer-Coster concentrated on floral paintings in oil, watercolor and gouache.

Anne Vallayer-Coster died in 1818 at the age of seventy-three having painted more than 120 still lifes, always with a distinctive colouristic brilliance.

Anne Vallayer-Coster worked principally in the varieties of still life developed over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Anne Vallayer-Coster used oil on canvas for most of her paintings.

Anne Vallayer-Coster achieved a great verisimilitude in the representation of materials and textures by the use of precise, finely blended brush strokes.

Anne Vallayer-Coster's work reveals the clear influence of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, as well as 17th-century Dutch masters, whose work has been far more highly valued, but what made Vallayer-Coster's style stand out against the other still life painters was her unique way of coalescing representational illusionism with decorative compositional structures.

Anne Vallayer-Coster's objective was to give an aspect of grandeur to everything that she painted; in doing so, she created an additional sense of stability and plenitude.

In March 2019, the Kimball Art Museum acquired Anne Vallayer-Coster's 1787 painting titled Still Life with Mackerel.