HAUDEBOURT-LESCOT, Hortense

(b. 1784 Paris, d. 1845 Paris)

Antoinette-Cécile-Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, French painter. At the age of seven she became a pupil of Guillaume Lethière, a family friend and popular history painter who was appointed director of the Académie de France in Rome in 1807. She followed him to Rome in 1808 and remained there until 1816, depicting the customs and costumes of the Italian peasantry in veristic detail. This experience abroad, rare for a woman artist, was a decisive influence on her art which in its picturesque and anecdotal images of everyday Italian life prefigured the work of the later genre specialists. She regularly exhibited her work at the Paris Salon, showing some 110 paintings there between 1811 and 1840.

She married the architect Louis-Pierre Haudebourt (1788-1849) in 1820, and died in Paris in 1845.

Italian Women

Many of Haudebourt-Lescot’s genre scenes illustrate the customs of Italy where she traveled when her teacher, Lethi�re, was named director of the French Academy in Rome.

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Mary, Queen of Scots

This painting was probably inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s The Abbot which vividly depicted the enmity between Mary, Queen of Scots and Margaret Erskine, Lady Lochleven, the mother of James Stuart, Mary’s illegitimate half-brother who claimed the throne as Regent during Mary’s imprisonment.

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Nude Model in the Artist's Studio

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Self-Portrait

Antoinette-C�cile-Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot was a French painter, mainly of genre scenes. She worked in Rome between 1808 and 1816.

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The Generosity of the Duchess of Angoulème

Haudebourt-Lescot continued the tradition of Boilly and Marguerite Gerard, painting intimate genre scenes with a high degree of finish. In the present painting, the Duchess of Angoul�me gives a young girl a purse as a dowry, her proud father, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, stands proudly looking on, some villagers can be seen looking at the scene through the cottage window.

The painter was patronized by the Duchess of Berry, sister-in-law of the Duchess of Angoul�me.

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