# VALLAYER-COSTER, Anne [View the canonical artist record]() ## Artist - Lifespan: 1744–1818 - Profession: painter - School: French ## Biography French painter. She spent her childhood at the Gobelins, where her father was a goldsmith. Though she thus belonged to artistic circles, when received \(reçue\) by the Académie Royale in 1770, on presentation of the still-lifes Attributes of Painting and Musical Instruments \(both Paris, Louvre\), she was known to have neither a teacher nor an official patron. She managed to get some training from a well-known marine painter, Joseph Vernet, but she picked up still-life all but on her own. She entered the Royal Academy in her mid-twenties, as precocious as François Boucher had been - and one of only four women before the Revolution. As a still-life painter she got Marie-Antoinette's patronage. Despite her closeness to the ancien régime and France's hated monarch, she survived decades of bloodshed and shifting tastes. In fact, one of Vallayer-Coster's grandest works dates to the end of her life. It also reprises the motifs of her earliest art. ## Related artworks - [A Hound with Dead Game in a Landscape]() - [Attributes of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture]() - [Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase]() - [Portrait of a Violinist]() - [Still-Life of Flowers in a Vase with a Shell]() - [Still-Life]() - [Still-Life with Musical Instruments]() - [Still-Life with Tuft of Marine Plants, Shells and Corals]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()