Ad la de Labille-Guiard (1749-1803), a remarkable portraitist, was among the small number of women ever granted membership in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.

This volume accompanies the first exhibition to recreate Casanova's visual world, from his birthplace of Venice to the cultural capitals of Paris and London. Summoning up the people he met and the cities, salons and masked balls he frequented, it provides a survey of important works of eighteenth-century European art.

This is a catalog from a recent art exhibit at the Grand Trianon. The Versailles website describes the show in this way:
"In addition to rulers from Queen Maria-Theresa of Austria to Empress Eugénie of France, portraits of women in the royal or imperial family – mothers, sisters, daughters and granddaughters – are on display in the gallery. Beside them, you can see paintings of women whose lives were interwoven with power – princesses and royal favourites – and of lesser-known figures: ladies of the royal court and women in the service of queens and empresses. A procession of three centuries of women in French history streams past the eyes of visitors, who can observe changing tastes in fashion and portraiture in famous works by Gobert, Rigaud, Nattier, Gérard, Gros and Winterhalter."

Caroline of Ansbach (1683-1737), Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (1719-1772), and Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz (1744-1818) were three German princesses who became Queens--or, in the case of Augusta, Queen in Waiting, Regent, and Princess Dowager--of Great Britain, and were linked by their early years at European princely courts, their curiosity, and investment in Enlightenment thought. This sumptuously illustrated book considers the ways these women left enduring marks on British culture. Objects included range from spectacular state portraits to pedagogical toys to plant and animal specimens, and reveal how the new intermingled with the traditional.

Fragonard, perhaps the most significant French painter of the eighteenth century, was condemned first as a purveyor of luxury items and later as an artist who abandoned noble subjects for the erotic genre. In this revisionist, art-historical study, Mary D. Sheriff challenges such pejorative views of Fragonard by arguing that he is better understood as an artist whose unsurpassed technical skill and witty manipulation of academic standards established a dynamic relation with the audience his art both courted and created.

Borin, Françoise. "Judging by Images."

Directing his pointed wit at the upper echelons of 18th-century British society, William Hogarth, a painter, printmaker, and social critic, mocked the politics and customs of his day. His series of satirical paintings and engravings, which still absorb viewers after nearly three centuries, record human vice and folly with a sharp eye and cutting intelligence. This compelling book, with an accompanying DVD narrated by Alan Bennett, examines Hogarth's best-known series of paintings,Marriage A-la-Mode, and unlocks many mysteries that have surrounded this gripping artistic commentary.

A richly illustrated literary anthology that explores the fantasies, seductions, and intrigues of the eighteenth-century French lover. This sumptuous volume presents more than eighty selections from eighteenth-century French literature, each concerning some facet of the game of love as practiced by the libertine, or the freethinking aristocratic hedonist, a type that flourished-not least in literature-in the declining years of the Ancien Regime. Each selection is illustrated by well-chosen period artworks, many rarely seen, by Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, and numerous others.

Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration include beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender.

In the early modern period, rulers demonstrated their power and influence through carefully curated "display"--their presence in court ceremonies, their palaces and their contents, and their portraits. Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669), queen consort of King Charles I of England, embraced these opportunities for display with particular flair. This richly illustrated book follows Henrietta Maria to chart her patronage and engagement with the visual arts, building works, and the luxury trade. It develops a powerful picture not just of the images, fashions, interiors, and buildings shaped by the queen's directorial influence but also of the political and religious factors that governed her choices and policies of court display.

The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. Pens and Needles is the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication.

Wonderfully engaging, this unique study shows how art reveals a misogynistic medical establishment's attitudes toward women. Dixon traces the origins of 'hysteria,' richly illustrating her analysis with more than 100 paintings from the 13th through the 18th centuries, focusing primarily on 17th-century Dutch works.-Publishers Weekly

Portraits of Queen Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768) were highly visible in eighteenth-century France. Her earliest portraits negotiated aspects of her ethnic difference, French gender norms, and royal rank to craft an image of an appropriate consort to the king. Later portraits by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Carle Van Loo, and Jean-Marc Nattier contributed to changing notions of queenship over the course of her 43 year tenure. Whether as royal wife, devout consort, or devoted mother, Marie Leszczinska's image mattered. It engages feminist theory while setting the queen's image in the context of portraiture in France, courtly factional conflict, and the history of the French monarchy.

This volume considers pictured and picturing women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy as the subjects, creators, patrons, and viewers of art. Women's experiences and needs (perceived by women themselves or defined by men on their behalf) are seen as important determinants in the production and consumption of visual culture. By using a variety of approaches the contributors demonstrate the importance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach when studying women in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

In this comprehensive interdisciplinary biography, James Winn tells the story of Anne's life in new breadth and detail, and in unprecedented cultural context. Demonstrating the extent to which Anne's patronage was informed by her practice, Winn shows how poets, painters, and musicians used the worksthey made for Anne to send overt and covert political messages to the queen, the court, the church, and Parliament. Richly illustrated with visual and musical examples, Winn draws on works by a wide array of artists, among them composer George Frideric Handel, poet Alexander Pope, painter Godfrey Kneller, and architect Christopher Wren, to shed new light on Anne's life and reign.

The rich collections of paintings and sculptures in the Louvre, Versailles, Fontainebleau are featured. The female artists were active from 1750 through 1848. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, this beautifully illustrated book examines eighteenth-century French theories of sexual difference and their influence on the 'woman-artist question'; paradoxical Revolutionary attitudes toward women artists, who encountered as many new limitations as opportunities; and the complex ways that women marketed their reputations and managed their cultural positions in France's intricate social and artistic hierarchy.

In this unusual and original study, Marcia Pointon examines the cultural effects and consequences of the participation by women in acts of representation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She explores their lives and work, and a cultural environment in which images of female saints and goddesses established indices of femininity in the homes of wealthy men. Did the women portrayed also possess artifacts, and did they use the power of gifts and bequests to determine social relations? Did they themselves participate in the processes of creating images of the seen world? Pointon sets out to answer some of these questions through a series of novel and vividly recounted case studies of women such as Emma Hamilton (wife and mistress), Mary Moser, the artist, and Dorothy Richardson, the antiquarian.

Seduction and eroticism were central themes of 18th Century French art. This book draws from the collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg to illustrate this theme.

Between c1350 and c1650, Italian urban societies saw much debate on women's nature, roles, education, and behaviour. This book fills a gap in the still burgeoning literature on all aspects of women's lives in this period. Using a broad range of material, most of which never translated before, this book illuminates the ideals and realities informing the lives of women within the context of civic and courtly culture in Renaissance Italy. The text is divided into three sections: contemporary views on the nature of women, and ethical and aesthetic ideals seen as suitable to them; life cycles from birth to death, punctuated by the rites of passage of betrothal, marriage and widowhood; women's roles in the convent, the court, the workplace, and in cultural life.