Category: 1780-1789
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1770-96 – Agostino Brunias, Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape
In a late 18th-century painting organized by skin tone, Agostino Brunias has depicted a range of colonial Dominican fashions from the wealthy elite to the poorest people whom they enslaved.
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1788 – Jacques Louis David, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and Marie-Anne Lavoisier
Jacques-Louis David painted famed scientist, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, and his wife, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, in 1788. This dual portrait was commissioned by Lavoisier and is executed in the neoclassical naturalism for which David is best known. Both are dressed in the latest fashions, embracing simplicity (in Paulze’s case) and somber restraint (in Lavoisier’s).
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1783 – Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress
Vigée Le Brun’s infamous portrait of Marie Antoinette embodies the tension between fashion and politics in 18th-century France.
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1787-9 – Alexandre-August Robineau, The Fencing-Match between the Chevalier de Saint-George and the Chevalier d’Eon
This 18th-century painting commemorates an historic fencing match between two French knights: one an illegitimate Black nobleman and the other a gender nonconforming spy.
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1785 – Marie-Victoire Lemoine, Portrait of a Youth in an Embroidered Vest
The young man in this portrait, dressed in formal French aristocratic style, represents the final flourish (or last gasp?) of the ancien régime in the last years before the French Revolution.
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1783 – Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette with a Rose
Court painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun depicts the extremely fashionable Queen Marie Antoinette wearing late 18th-century French aristocratic costume (a robe à la française).
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robe en chemise
A dress fashionable in the 1780s, constructed out of muslin with a straight cut gathered with a sash or drawstring.
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Recent Essays
kenteIn 17th century, 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, 21st century, Africa, K, term definition
AkweteIn 19th century, 20th century, A, Africa, term definition
cochineal dyesIn 14th century, 15th century, 16th century, 17th century, 18th century, Americas, C, term definition
wampumIn 17th century, 18th century, 19th century, Americas, term definition, W
moccasinsIn 19th century, Americas, M, term definition
