Artist Anne Vallayer Coster (1744 - 1818) French Painter | Still Lifes & Portrait

Anne Valéricostre was born December 21, 1744, died February 28, 1818. He was a major 18th-century French painter best known for still lifes. She achieved fame and recognition very early in her career, being admitted to the Académie Royale de Pontoretto Sculpture in 1770. At the age of 26, despite the low status that still life painting had at this time, Valéricostre's highly developed skills, especially in the depiction of flowers, soon generated a great deal of attention from collectors and other artists. Her precocious talent and the rave reviews earned her the attention of the court, where Marie Antoinette took a particular interest in Valéricostre's paintings. Valéricostre worked principally in the varieties of still life developed over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. Conventional morality precluded women artists from drawing from the nude model, which was the necessary foundation for the higher genres. Still life, considered the least intellectual of the genres and the lowest in the academic hierarchy, was therefore deemed the appropriate subject for female artists. While accepting this limitation in order to gain admission to the Académie, the main conduit of royal patronage, Valéricostre devoted her formidable technical abilities to the still life. Creating works of undeniable seriousness and real visual interest, Valéricostre used oil on canvas for most of her paintings. She achieved a great verisimilitude in the representation of materials and textures by the use of precise, finely blended brushstrokes. According to the art historian Marianne Roland-Michel, it was the bold, decorative lines of her compositions, the richness of her colors and simulated textures, and the feats of illusionism she achieved in depicting wide variety of objects, both natural and artificial that drew the attention of the Royal Académie and the numerous collectors who purchased her paintings. This interaction between art and nature was quite common in Dutch, Flemish, and French still lifes. Her work reveals the clear influence of Jean-Baptiste Séméon Chardin, as well as 17th century Dutch masters, whose work has been far more highly valued. But what made Valéricostre's style stand out against the other still life painters was her unique way of coalescing representational illusionism with decorative compositional structures. Her objective was to give an aspect of grandeur to everything that she painted. In doing so, she created an additional sense of stability and plenitude. The critic John Haber, who describes her work as lacking inwardness, says that the solidity and reassuring materiality of her compositions appealed to elite bankers and aristocrats, who could appreciate her rendering of contrasting veneers of different woods or an extravagant collection of coral and shells. Things that took years to come into being and will last for decades to come.