Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet
1767–1832 · France · Neoclassicism, Academic art
The story
Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet made her name at the Paris Salon painting something the grand history painters of her day looked down on: small children caught in ordinary moments, usually with an animal beside them. A girl trying to teach her dog to read, a child asleep under the guard of a big dog, a young girl scattering feed for her chickens. These tender, closely watched scenes found a wide public from the Salon of 1799 onward.
She had trained first with Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the celebrated portraitist of Queen Marie Antoinette, and then with the sculptor Antoine-Denis Chaudet, whom she went on to marry. Her subjects recall the sentimental scenes of the older painter Greuze, though she set her figures in the cleaner, firmer framing that the Neoclassical taste around her favoured.
Widowed in 1810, she married a civil servant two years later and kept showing her work at the Salon well into the 1810s.
