Marie-Victoire Lemoine

Marie-Victoire Lemoine was born in Paris in 1754, the eldest daughter of Charles Lemoine and Marie-Anne Rousselle. Her family produced several painters: her sisters Marie-Denise Villers and Marie-Élisabeth Gabiou both took up the brush, as did a cousin, Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet. In the early 1770s Lemoine entered the studio of François-Guillaume Ménageot, working in a building acquired by the dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun that stood beside the atelier of France's leading woman painter, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun.

That proximity placed her inside a rare network of professional women artists during the Enlightenment. Lemoine remained unmarried and supported herself entirely through painting, an unusual arrangement in her era. She first showed work at Pahin de la Blancherie's Salon de Correspondance in 1779, exhibiting a portrait of the Princesse de Lamballe.

After the Paris Salon opened to women, she appeared there in 1796, 1798, 1799, 1802, 1804, and 1814. She mainly produced portraits, miniatures, and genre scenes, signing canvases with the compact signature "M. Vic Lemoine." Her best-known surviving picture, The Interior of an Atelier of a Woman Painter (1789), now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was once read as a portrait of Vigée Le Brun with a pupil; later scholarship suggests it shows Lemoine herself alongside her sister Marie-Élisabeth.

She lived with her parents until 1779, then moved in with Marie-Élisabeth and stayed there even after her sister's death. She died in Paris on 2 December 1820, aged sixty-six, leaving only ten francs in cash.