PERIOD DRAMA APPRECIATION WEEK 2022 DAY 4 FAVORITE FILM → PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019) “Perhaps he makes a choice. He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.”
“if you are intolerable, let me be the one to tolerate you,” i said, and then i kissed her and tasted the lemon juice on her lips.
and what does it mean that we have not spoken in a decade but i still hear your voice in my head every day?
now the only person i think about is you.
let’s get married right here and now. me and you. in this bed. you don’t even have to put on a white nightgown.
"so please don’t say you’re proud of me when i’ve lost my way” “then can i say: i couldn’t get my mind off you all day”
you are a call to motion. there, all of you, a verb in perfect view.
slap my face, or hold me till winter.
let’s be scared together. let’s pretend that nothing is awful. there’s nothing to fear, just stay right here.
“do you regret?” “i’d do it again. i’d like to believe that i’d do it again and again and again… and what more can i say?”
as she sees him, her heart skips, just once. like it used to. he hears it.
“you dreamt of me?” “no, i thought of you”
now you hang from my lips like the gardens of babylon, with your boots beneath my bed, forever is the sweetest con.
i don’t know where this road will end but i’ll walk it with you hand in hand. do you let me walk with you?
i was thinking that i would like to never have to leave this room. what do you think about that? …let’s just stay here.
sometimes… i still wish we never left that room.
yes, now i know that home is where you are.
in the low lamp light i was free, heaven and hell were words to me. when my time comes around, lay me gently in the cold dark earth. no grave can hold my body down, i’ll crawl home to her.
“i’ll take care of you.” “it’s rotten work.” “not to me. not if its you.”
the seven husbands of evelyn hugo [book] / in the heights [musical]/ movement [song] / falsettos [musical] / elektra (1996) #12 [comic] / portrait of a lady on fire [film] / cowboy like me [song] / hadestown [musical] / daredevil vol. 2 #37 [comic] / catch me if you can [musical] / work song [song] / grief lessons: four plays by euripides [play]
In the film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” the protagonist is a female portraitist in 18th century France. She is portrayed as a respected professional, with significant personal and economic independence. Could a woman in 18th century Western Europe really have a professional career as an artist?
Yes, certainly! There were a number of respected eighteenth century female artists.
The most famous is Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), the daughter of significantly less famous artist Louis Vigée, who died when she was little; she married a (male) painter as well. Relatively early in her career she became a portraitist to the nobility, and by the 1780s she was painting Marie Antoinette herself and a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpting. She fled the French Revolution and took up posts in other royal courts around Europe to support herself while keeping her stock high.
Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) is another very big name in the eighteenth century art world. She was Swiss, and the daughter of a painter who trained her while they traveled around Europe, leading to her career starting at an early age. She was a member of multiple academies in different regions as well, from Florence to England.
The question of how people could hold particular beliefs about women’s inferiority to men while also having women with power or standing in their society comes up relatively frequently on AskHistorians. The fact is that gender is infinitely more complicated than a simple oppressed/oppressing dichotomy; rather than being completely marginalized by the men who dominated the art world of the eighteenth century, they found ways to make themselves part of the structure as well, though said men would rarely consider them as good as the best male artists. Several of the chapters in Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) speak directly to the issue, making the point that women’s participation in the arts went along with perceptions of what could be classified as “women’s work”.
Watercolors, miniatures, and wax- or cameo-carving, for instance, were easy for people to accept as fields for women because they were seen as delicate, requiring a graceful hand - similar to the way that once women began taking up positions in offices, using a typewriter was reclassified as something women would be inherently suited to as it was similar to playing the piano, a common feminine accomplishment. (Really!) People of the eighteenth century also found it relatively easy to accept “sculptresses” who did the creative work modeled in clay and had a man carve it in marble (though they were open to criticism of allowing those male assistants more creative license, and therefore the notion that they weren’t really the creators of the works), and were more suspicious or scornful of women like Anne Damer (1748-1828) who wielded a hammer and chisel themselves, from remarks about the quality of their work to caricatures portraying them as too masculine.
But, that being said, they were still allowed to do their work, and were still commissioned and paid to do it, because their art was valuable and wanted. The average person doesn’t not know any female artists from before 1850 because there weren’t any, but because they were never allowed to be considered at the very top of their fields, and therefore weren’t included in later retrospectives of the art canon.
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