Portrait d'un violoniste

Anne Vallayer-Coster painted this seated musician in 1773, and for a woman artist in France that decade it was a remarkable moment to be at. Just three years earlier she had been admitted to the Royal Academy, which almost never opened its doors to women, and she went on to enjoy the protection of Marie Antoinette. She was celebrated above all for still life, and you can feel that here in the careful attention to the instrument, the sheet music and the fall of the woman's dress. Scholars think the sitter may be one of the painter's own sisters. Look at the strings of the instrument and you find a quiet reminder folded in. Two of them are broken, a traditional sign of the shortness of life that a viewer in 1773 would have read at once.