Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien and the emergence of Neoclassicism

This thesis forms the first comprehensive study of the life and work of eighteenth-century scientific illustrator and natural history painter Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien (1735–1806). Structured thematically across four chapters, this study demonstrates the ways in which Reboul honoured the plant and animal subject matter in her image-making and employed natural history iconography to powerful and purposeful communicative ends. Throughout her career, Reboul engaged in generative collaborations with scientists and fellow artists. By considering how Reboul navigated the opportunities and limitations inherent to collaborative projects, this thesis examines the ways in which women artists in the early modern period encountered the gender politics of shared authorship. Until now, Reboul has been known to art history as the wife of Joseph-Marie Vien, who was celebrated during his lifetime as the restorer of the French school and has since been hailed as the father of Neoclassical history painting in France. I argue that Reboul contributed significantly to her husband’s practice, influencing his iconographical choices and painting the subjects in his compositions within her areas of expertise as a painter of flora and fauna. This study considers how Reboul consistently challenged the hegemony of the patriarchal systems she encountered by acting as an equal collaborator and activating the language of natural history in ways that asserted and challenged her own creative agency. In doing so this project establishes a new account of the character of early Neoclassicism, restores the role of Reboul in the development of eighteenth-century French art, attends to the practice of collegial collaboration in art-making, and recenters non-human plant and animal life represented in academic painting.