Born: 1774, France
Died: 19 August 1821
Country most active: France
Also known as: Marie-Denise Lemoine
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
French portrait painter Marie-Denise Villers’s most famous painting, Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes/Young Woman Drawing (1801) was attributed to Jacques-Louis David, under whom she studied. This may have been an honest mistake due to similarities in style, or it could have been deliberate as David was the better-known painter. Even after the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the painting in 1917, it was decades before curator Charles Stirling, in 1951, verified the painting was first exhibited at the 1801 Paris Salon. Because David had boycotted the event that year, he could not have painted Young Woman Drawing. Stirling proposed that a woman may have been the artist, but it took another four decades until Margaret Oppenheimer identified Villers through in-depth research of David’s students. Art historian Anne Higonet argues it’s actually a self-portrait, as the features resemble a painting of Viller by her sister Marie-Victoire Lemoine. This theory supposes that the family who bought it renamed it Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes after purchase, which would support the idea that they knowingly lied about the painting’s creator, a deception that lasted more than 100 years.