Pride and Prejudice: Female Artists in France and Sweden, 1750-1860 opens with a dazzling array of paintings executed by some of the most notable French female artists of the eighteenth century. These works are eventually joined by an arsenal of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes by their Swedish counterparts who were active during the same time. Together, the artwork and personal stories of these women unite in one exhibition that displays the common triumphs and struggles experienced by artists in these two seemingly disconnected countries. This show highlights both professional and amateur artists who worked within the academic system and were able to establish themselves as respected members of their field.

The scope of the exhibition is broad and encapsulates these artists’ production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France and Sweden. 250 examples of their artistic output are spread over four main galleries. Most of the paintings in the French component were transferred from the exhibition organised earlier this year in Washington D.C. by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections. These pieces form the impressive cornerstone of the Stockholm exhibition, and their weight is immediately felt as soon as one enters the first gallery. Organised according to artist, each part features a biographical sketch and a selection of works chosen to portray the scope of her career. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun are undoubtedly the two stars of this section, and works such as Marquise Marie-Thérèse-Odile de La Valette (Labille-Guiard, 1787), Duchess Marie Adélaïde d’Orléans (Vigée-Lebrun, 1789), and Baroness Bonne-Marie-Joséphine-Gabrielle de Crussol-Florensac (Vigée-Lebrun, 1785) illustrate the high social standing of the patrons that these artists were able to attract over the course of their careers.

Other possibly less well-known, but veritable talents in their own right also share the spotlight. Works by Marie-Suzanne Giroust, Marie Thérèse Reboul, Anne Vallayer-Coster, and Marie Victoire Lemoine represent the diversity of genres and media in which these artists specialised. Reboul’s most popular paintings were watercolours of flowers and animals, although she began as a miniaturist. Giroust (not a part of the D.C. show) was a remarkable pastellist and one of the few female members of the French Academy. Her works are highlighted in this exhibition not only for their technical skill, but also because the curators hoped to reveal her connection with Sweden.

Giroust was married to the celebrated eighteenth-century Swedish portraitist, Alexander Roslin, and she is the subject of his painting The Lady with the Veil (1768, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), which is considered to be his best-recognised and most popular work. Although this well-loved portrait is sometimes identified as a portrait of the wife of the artist, it is not always known that she was highly accomplished and sought after as a portraitist in her own right. Trained by pastel master Maurice-Quentin de la Tour in Paris, she achieved a remarkable measure of success in her field before her life was cut short by cancer just shy of her fortieth birthday. Although pastels are difficult to transport and display, six have managed to be a part of this exhibition, with three belonging to the collection of the Nationalmuseum.

Operating as a woman artist within the realm of the Academy was a sometimes complicated and fraught endeavour. The French Academy had a cap of four female members at a time, and before the Revolution, the death of two of its members was the only way that places were freed for more women to be able to take advantage of the benefits offered by academy membership. The situation was slightly grimmer in Sweden, as women were not allowed to become full members until 1773, and they could only exhibit paintings starting in 1783. The artist’s relationship to her male colleagues was therefore of specific importance; women tended to learn their trade from the male members of their families as their access to formal studies at the academies was almost entirely restricted due to the emphasis on learning anatomy from life drawing. Many worked in their family’s studios, or were married to artists themselves, thus providing easier access to a professional realm that might otherwise prove difficult to break into successfully. In the didactic texts to the exhibition, as well as the catalogue, the curators repeatedly stress that ‘female emancipation’ as independent artists ‘took place within the structure of a male hegemony, not in confrontation’ with it.

The Swedish section begins with highlights from the work of Ulrica Fredrica Pasch, a portraitist active in the later half of the eighteenth century. She worked in her father’s studio alongside her brother, and the two collaborated on many canvases. She had clients in her own right, however, and members of the aristocracy, clergy, and other wealthy members of society sat for her. Moving through the rest of the exhibition section devoted to Swedish eighteenth-century artists, works by amateur artists take prominence as, despite their non-professional status, they were allowed to take part in the annual exhibitions at the Swedish Academy. In contrast to France, this represented a broader picture of the art market in Sweden during this time, and the numerous landscapes, embroidered genre scenes, and works on paper also display the wealth of different media being employed by these artists.

The nineteenth century rooms include paintings from the Napoleonic era in both countries, with portraits, historical works, and large-scale landscapes. The Nationalmuseum’s extensive collection of portrait miniatures has a chance to shine in this exhibition as well, with several of the collection’s finest pieces executed by, or featuring women artists on display in the French nineteenth-century room, including the self-portrait of Adélaide Victoire Hall (1772-1844) and Dumont’s portrait in profile of Marguerite Gérard (1804). Several paintings of the artists’ studio drive home the point time and time again how segregated the learning system was for women. Nude, live models were forbidden and even the fronts of plaster casts were turned to the wall in order to protect female virtue, as evidenced in the painting of the class in Pujol’s studio from 1836 by Adrienne Grandpierre-Deverzy. This is set in direct contrast with another view by the same artist of Pujol’s studio, this time free of students and all the hindrances lifted. A female model relaxes semi-nude in plain sight and all of the chaos of the previous scene is forgotten.

Throughout the exhibition, the theme remains clear, with the woman as artist being the focal point, and the surrounding socio-historical factors harmonising to illustrate the full context of what it was like to work as a professional female artist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although at times there is a feeling of a lack of unity between the pieces as the paintings from France and Sweden are kept apart from each other in a manner stricter than is probably beneficial, it is easy to identify the common factors that women from both countries had to work with and overcome in their working lives. It is clearly shown that, despite innumerable challenges and sometimes repressive societal expectations, being both a woman and an artist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not mutually exclusive.

‘Pride and Prejudice: Female Artists in France and Sweden, 1750-1860’ is at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, from 27 September 2012 to 20 January 2013.