Marie-Thérèse Reboul

{{Short description|French artist (1735–1806)}}

{{Infobox artist

| name = Marie-Thérèse Reboul-Vien

| image = The artist Marie Thérèse Reboul.jpg

| imagesize =

| caption = Marie-Thérèse Reboul-Vien (1757) by Alexander Roslin

| birth_name =

| birth_date = {{birth date|1735|02|26|df=y}}

| birth_place = Paris, France

| death_date = {{death date and age|1806|07|04|1735|02|26|df=y}}

| death_place = Paris, France

| nationality = French

| education =

| field = Painting, engraving

| training =

| movement =

| works = Two Pigeons on a Tree Branch (1762)

| patrons =

| awards =

| spouse = {{Marriage|Joseph-Marie Vien|1757}}

| partner =

}}

Marie-Thérèse Reboul (26 February 1735—4 January 1806),{{cite book|title=Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart|editor1-last=Thieme|editor1-first=Ulrich|editor2-last=Becker|editor2-first=Felix|publisher=E.A. Seemann|location=Leipzig|year=1940|volume=34|page=338}}{{cite book|title=Dictionnaire critique de biographie et d'histoire|last=Jal|first=Augustin|year=1867 |url=https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_WcwKAQAAIAAJ/page/1264/mode/2up|publisher=Henri Plon|location=Paris|pages=1265–1266}} commonly called Madame Vien,{{cite journal|last=Hottle|first=Andrew D.|title=Present but Absent: The Art and Life of Madame Vien|journal=Southeastern College Art Conference Review|volume=16|number=4|year=2014|pages=424–442}} was a French painter and engraver of natural history subjects, still lifes, and flowers.

In 1757, Marie-Thérèse Reboul married the painter Joseph-Marie Vien, who was nineteen years older. Nineteenth-century sources state that she was taught by her husband,{{cite book|title=Les Femmes artistes à l'Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture|url=https://archive.org/details/lesfemmesartist00fidigoog/page/n37/mode/2up|last=Fidière|first=Octave|publisher=Charavay Frères|location=Paris|year=1885|pages=27–31}} but Joseph-Marie Vien's autobiography does not mention it. She may have been a student of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte. Prior to her marriage, Reboul-Vien engraved specimens for Sénégal: Coquillages (1757) by the French naturalist Michel Adanson and Dissertation sur le papyrus (1758) by the French antiquarian Anne Claude de Caylus.

File:Reboul-Two_Pigeons.jpg

Reboul-Vien was one of only fifteen women to be accepted as full academicians in the 145-year history of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris. She was admitted in 1757, the same year in which she married Joseph-Marie Vien. It had been 37 years since the last woman, Rosalba Carriera, became an academician. Reboul-Vien's husband was a prominent member of the Académie, which likely led to her acceptance.{{cite book|title=Women Artists, 1550–1950|author1-last=Harris|author1-first=Ann Sutherland|author2-last=Nochlin|author2-first=Linda|publisher=Los Angeles County Museum of Art|location=Los Angeles|year=1976|page=36}} At the time, Reboul-Vien was described as "a painter of miniatures and gouaches specializing in flowers, butterflies and birds."{{cite book|editor-last=Pomeroy|editor-first=Jordana|editor-link=Jordana Pomeroy|title=Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections|publisher=National Museum of Women in the Arts|location=Washington, DC|year=2012|page=120}} Her reception piece was Two Pigeons Pigeons on a Tree Branch, which she submitted to the Académie in 1762.{{cite book|editor-last=Rosenberg|editor-first=Pierre|title=Les peintres du roi, 1648-1793|publisher=Réunion des Musées Nationaux|date=2000}}

She exhibited her works at the Salons of 1757, 1759, 1763, 1765, and 1767.{{cite book|editor1-last=Seznec|editor1-first=Jean|editor2-last=Adhémar|editor2-first=Jean|title=Diderot: Salons, 1759-1781|publisher=Clarendon Press|location=Oxford|year=1957}} These included watercolors of a hen with her chicks, a kestrel killing a small bird, a golden pheasant from China, a brooding pigeon, and a bird of prey following a butterfly. At the Salon of 1767, Denis Diderot praised A Crested Hen Watching over Her Chicks as a "very handsome small painting" that was "painted with great vigor and coloristic truth ... Everything's right, including the bits of straw scattered around the hen."{{cite book|title=Diderot on Art, Volume II: The Salon of 1767|translator=John Goodman|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven|date=1995|page=136}} He concluded, more critically, "I'm surprised by her hen; I didn't think she was this accomplished." Even so, reviews of Reboul-Vien's works were mostly positive. Several of her works were acquired by Catherine the Great.{{cite book|last=Gabet|first=Charles Henri Joseph|title=Dictionnaire des artistes de l'ecole française, au XIXe siècle|year=1854|chapter=Vien (Mme. Marie Reboul)|publisher=Chez Madame Vergne, Libraire|location=Paris|page=690|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XCkGAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA690}} By the late the nineteenth century, few of her watercolors could be located.