Marie-Denise Villers

Marie-Denise Villers was born Marie-Denise Lemoine in Paris in 1774 into a family of portraitists: two of her three sisters, Marie-Victoire Lemoine and Marie-Élisabeth Gabiou, and her cousin Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet, all trained as portrait painters. Known within her family as "Nisa," she married the architecture student Michel-Jean-Maximilien Villers in 1794, a marriage that notably supported rather than ended her professional career. She studied with Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, François Gérard, and Jacques-Louis David, and first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1799.

She showed work again in 1801, 1802, and 1814. Her most discussed painting, the portrait of Charlotte du Val d'Ognes (1801), also called Young Woman Drawing, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1917 as a David, demoted to anonymous in 1951 when curator Charles Sterling suggested a woman had painted it, and finally reattributed to Villers in 1995 through the research of Margaret Oppenheimer. The canvas depicts a young artist interrupted at her easel near a cracked windowpane, backlit by cool daylight.

Her 1802 Étude de femme d'après nature, long misidentified as a portrait of Madame Soustras, is now in the Louvre; the sitter's hands belong to a model, but the face is Villers's own. Her last documented work, a portrait of the Duchess of Angoulême, appeared at the Salon of 1814. Nothing is known of her life between that date and her death on 19 August 1821.