Marie-Gabrielle Capet, 1761-1818 : Une Virtuose De La Miniature

Exhibition at the Musée des beaux-arts de Caen, 14 June - 21 September 2014

Stolen eighty years ago, Marie-Gabrielle Capet's (1761-1818) masterpiece in miniature, Portrait of Houdon Working on the Bust of Voltaire, has just found its place in the Caen Museum. This miraculous return is an opportunity to offer this endearing portraitist a first exhibition, of which this book is the catalogue: around her most beautiful effigies on ivory, combining accuracy of touch with a vibrant rendering of light, are also presented works illustrating her talents as a pastelist, painter and draughtswoman.

From the last splendours of the Ancien Régime to the first hours of the Restoration, Marie-Gabrielle Capet was a discreet but gracious witness to the political and artistic upheavals of France, in the wake of the two masters whose lives she shared, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and François-André Vincent.