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Image

Jean Nicolas Laugier, engraver

Portrait of Anne Louise Germaine Necker Baronne de Staël Holstein, known as Madame de Staël, 1818

Description

Maker

  • Jean Nicolas Laugier, 1785-1875, French, engraver
  • After Baron François Pascal Simon Gérard, 1770-1837, French, designer
  • Antoine François Piéri-Bénard, French, publisher

Title

Portrait of Anne Louise Germaine Necker Baronne de Staël Holstein, known as Madame de Staël

Year

1818

Medium

engraving

Materials/Techniques

Materials

  • engraving

Dimensions

42.5 x 30.8 cm (16 13/16 x 12 1/8 inches) (plate)

Signature / Inscription / Marks

Lettered LL: "Peint par Gerard"; LC: "1818"; and LR: "Grave' par Laugier"; and "Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël Holstein. A Paris chez Benard Boulevard des Italiens N.o 11 et les Marchands d'Estampes"

Type

  • Works on Paper,
  • Prints

Credit

Gift in memory of William Babcock Weeden by his children

Object Number

43.400.162X

About

Wearing an Empire-style dress, a shawl draped around one arm and ivy—a symbol of fidelity and endurance—in her hand, Germaine de Staël leans on a marble ledge looking confidently past the viewer. While her dress recalls Greco-Roman tunics, her hair is wrapped in a “Turkish” turban, an exoticizing accessory fashionable at the time. A society hostess, novelist, and political thinker, Madame de Staël was a friend of Madame Récamier, portrayed in this gallery, and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, portrayed in the adjacent gallery. She was also an outspoken critic of Napoleon’s despotic ambitions—a stance that forced her to spend more than a decade in exile. This highly detailed engraving, executed in the French academic style, was based on an earlier portrait by Neoclassical painter François Gérard.

Lettered LL: "Peint par Gerard"; LC: "1818"; and LR: "Grave' par Laugier"; and "Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël Holstein. A Paris chez Benard Boulevard des Italiens N.o 11 et les Marchands d'Estampes"

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Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in the public domain (CC0 1.0). This object is Portrait of Anne Louise Germaine Necker Baronne de Staël Holstein, known as Madame de Staël with the accession number of 43.400.162X. To request high-resolution files or new photography, please send an email to imagerequest@risd.edu and include your name and the object's accession number.

Feedback

We view our online collection as a living documents, and our records are frequently revised and enhanced. If you have additional information or have spotted an error, please send feedback to curatorial@risd.edu.

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