Madeleine Françoise Basseporte

Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, (; 28 April 1701 – 6 September 1780) was a French painter. From 1741 until her death, she served as the Royal Painter for the King's Garden and Cabinet (now the Jardin des Plantes), an unprecedented appointment for a woman artist at the time.

Life Basseporte was born and died in Paris. Originally a portrait painter specializing in pastels, she apprenticed with the botanical illustrator Claude Aubriet, requiring her to shift from pastels to watercolors and to adopt a precise, near-photographic style. In 1741, she replaced the ailing Aubriet as "Peintre du Roy, de son Cabinet et du Jardin" (King's Painter, of his cabinet and garden), making her the first female artist to occupy the office. She served for nearly 40 years in this capacity, employing not only scientific illustration skills, but also the capacity to dissect plants and reveal their internal structures. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau paid tribute to her, writing "Nature gives plants their existence, but Mademoiselle Basseporte gives them their preservation." King Louis XV commissioned her to teach his daughters, the royal princesses, how to paint flowers. She is also believed to have been frequently consulted as an interior decorator by the royal mistress Madame de Pompadour.

Influences Basseporte's first teacher was the painter and engraver Paul-Ponce-Antoine Robert (also known as Robert de Sery). Under the patronage of the Cardinal de Rohan, Robert exposed Basseporte to the paintings of old masters in the Hôtel de Soubise and Palais-Royal in Paris.

After Robert's death, Basseporte was apprenticed to Claude Aubriet and eventually succeeded him as the official painter of the Jardin du roi, and adding to Les Vélins du Roi. During her time at the Jardin du Roi, Basseporte met the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. In 1739, naturalist and author Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was appointed director of the Jardin du Roi; Basseporte was hired as official painter for the Jardin two years later. Some of her correspondence with Buffon still exists. It is during this time that she is believed to have also worked as an interior decorator for Madame de Pompadour, the king's official mistress. The ones included in below links belong to a series of 117 prints that were once incorrectly attributed to Pierre Joseph Redouté, an artist who worked much later than Basseporte, but are now believed to have been by Basseporte. By viewing samples of Basseporte's work from this series, one can see the variety of content in which Basseporte both studied and depicted - from the leafy and green Polygonatum Multifloratum (Solomon's seal) and Nepeta Glechoma (ground ivy) to the bright red delicate petals of the Papaver (poppy). Each of these are shown isolated as single specimens and are restricted within the confines of illustrated frames against a plain background.