An 18th Century Still Life

18TH CENTURY STILL LIFE OF FLOWERS IN A DECORATED URN, Circle of Anne Vallayer Coster (1744-1818)

Vallayer-Coster joined the French Royal Academy in 1770 as a painter of still life, the genre conventionally considered suitable to women artists in eighteenth-century Europe and the lowest of the Academy’s hierarchy of genres. She enjoyed favorable critical opinion throughout her career, as well as the patronage of Queen Marie Antoinette before the Revolution and Empress Josephine after. This painting was probably among the four still lifes and two portraits that Vallayer-Coster exhibited at the Salon of 1781.
re-framed.