Self-Portrait

Andien de Clermont's 1755 Self-Portrait in the Milwaukee Art Museum is a rare surviving work by this obscure but interesting figure — a French-born female painter who worked in England in the mid-eighteenth century, primarily as a decorative painter producing chinoiserie designs. Female self-portraits from this period are always documents of professional self-assertion: women painters faced enormous structural barriers to recognition and institutional membership. De Clermont represents the largely unwritten history of women's participation in eighteenth-century British decorative and fine arts beyond the better-known figures of Kauffmann and Vigée Le Brun.

The self-portrait shows competent oil technique in the Rococo mode — soft flesh modeling, attentive rendering of dress and accessories, a direct but slightly formal gaze. The composition follows conventional self-portrait formula without the elaborate studio props that male painters sometimes used to assert their professional status.