Louise Moillon

Belonging to the wider circle of Calvinist exiles from Catholic Flanders working in the Saint-Germain des-Prés area of Paris, Moillon was the sole female practitioner of a group that included Sébastien Stosskopf, Jacques Linard, and Lubin Baugin. Louise Moillon reassesses the importance of this painter of still-life (and occasional genre) paintings through a consideration of the context in which she was working; the centrality of the genre of still life in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris in the earlier part of the seventeenth century; and provides close visual analyses of her works.

Moillon offers a useful case study of a supremely talented artist whose relative posthumous invisibility may be explained by three key features: her gender; the genre of still life at which she excelled but which became increasingly overlooked after the foundation of the French Académie royale in 1648; and a change in her domestic role after her marriage, when she produced fewer works. This book questions some of the ways in which Moillon’s story has been represented since the beginnings of the revival of interest in her work in the early twentieth century. In particular, it draws on more recent scholarship which grants early modern women from Moillon’s social class greater agency than was previously assumed and grants her a rightful place alongside her male contemporaries.