Comments on: Marie-Denise Villers (update)

By: Charley Parker

Charley Parker — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:09:29 +0000

Thanks, David. I appreciate the additional background information. (Sorry for the delay in your comment appearing, my spam filter can be overly aggressive at times.)

My own opinion of the painting as a self-portrait, unscientific and unacademic to be sure, comes from the similarity I see in the gaze of the young woman to a “look” that I’ve noticed in the eyes of numerous self-portraits by other artists.

By: David Reed

David Reed — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 20:31:38 +0000

When the painting was sold in 1897, the seller (mistakenly) believed an old family story that it was a portrait of his grandmother (Charlotte val d’Ognes) by David. This attribution followed the work into the Met’s collection in 1917. In the 40?s and 50?s the attribution was first questioned and then refuted on stylistic grounds by art historians but no firm re-attribution was made. The connection to M-D Villers was firmly established by M.A Oppenheimer in a PhD thesis (NYU-unpublished as far as I know) in 1996.

The (still not firm) identification of the woman as Villers herself comes from other paintings for which Villers was known to be the model. There is a good piece summarizing this in the Gazette des Beaux Arts in April 1996 and in the catalogue of an exhibition at the Smith Art Gallery which hung in 2005.

By: Beth Chester

Beth Chester — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:43:10 +0000

Thanks so much for posting info about this artist and painting. Saw this at the Met and have been haunted by it ever since b/c I look just like her. So much so, that strangers were asking if I had posed for the painting. I have wanted to know more about it for a long time. It’s good to know that it is accepted as a self portrait by a talented female artist, as I suspected from that day I saw it at the Met.