Susanne Dunlap is the author of the new historical novel The Portraitist. It focuses on the artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749-1803). Her other books include The Paris Affair. She lives in Biddeford, Maine.
Q: In your Author's Note for The Portraitist, you write that you were originally planning to write about the artist Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. Why did you end up focusing on Adélaïde Labille-Guiard instead?
A: The more research I did, the more I realized that as much as I loved Elisabeth’s art, the story of her underdog rival (much less well-known) captured my interest.
The fact that Adélaïde’s name does not appear in Elisabeth’s three-volume memoir also intrigued me. Why would she not mention the one woman artist who dogged her every step, exhibited in the same salons, and had to have been well known to her? As a novelist, I look for conflict, and that opened up a whole realm of potential conflicts to explore—or imagine.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between the two artists?
A: This is a hard question to answer because in real life, there are few if any records of how they thought of each other. As I said, Elisabeth doesn’t mention Adélaïde’s name in her memoir, but there are oblique references to her and Elisabeth’s belief that she poisoned Mesdames (the king’s aunts) against her.
I can only imagine that they were in fierce competition, especially around being elected to the Académie Royale in the same year. The Comte d’Angiviller was very against electing women, and had pushed Marie Antoinette to limit the number of women to only four—which would have meant just one of them could be elected.
But that problem managed to sort itself out because one of the women members was no longer exhibiting in the salons.
Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you see as the right blend
between fiction and history as you wrote the book?
A: Of course I read everything I could get my hands on about the two artists and other important artists at the time, looked into the history of the Académie and the Louvre before, during, and after the Revolution, and pieced together Elisabeth’s sittings with Marie Antoinette and Adélaïde’s various royal commissions.
There are slews of resources about the period and the place, including Turgot’s building-level map of Paris in the 1730s. What was lacking was biographical information about Adélaïde, and any idea of why she and her husband split up, how she—the daughter of a modiste—ended up being such a superb artist, etc.
And that is both good and bad. Bad because of the lack of documentation, good because it leaves me with a lot of scope for invention and drawing inferences.
Every historical novel is a blend of fact and fiction. As soon as you put words in a historical character’s mouth or describe how they felt or guess why they did something, it’s fiction. Then extensive research makes what you invent plausible. There is no “right” blend. It’s whatever works for a particular story. And that’s the point: The story comes first, even when it’s based in history.
Q: What do you see as Labille-Guiard's legacy today?
A: Her legacy is the magnificent works of art she left behind, which are far fewer than Elisabeth’s. Many of her paintings were destroyed during the revolution, and her output afterwards slowed. She apparently concentrated more on teaching then. She died young (54) and there’s nothing to indicate of what, so it’s possible she could have been ill for quite a long time.
Her work is a bit of a counter-example to Elisabeth’s, whose paintings emphasized beauty and grace above close observance and reality.
Both artists are among the best to come out of that period in France, and important as examples of how women found ways to thrive in male-dominated environments, how they were able to negotiate institutionalized sexism to achieve great things.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Funny you should ask! I’m writing a series of six novellas about Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun because, well, I have so much material and had already written a great deal through the different iterations of The Portraitist. I’m planning to have them finished before the end of the year.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I suppose that I am not and never have been an artist myself! I am in fact a music historian (Ph.D. Yale). But I have a lifelong love of art and haunt museums anywhere I go. My general interest as a novelist is women in the arts of all kinds.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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