Marie-Victoire Jaquotot

Marie-Victoire Jaquotot (maʁi vik.twaʁ ʒakɔto) (15 January 1772 – 27 April 1855) was a 19th-century French painter. In 1816, with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Jaquotot earned the title “First Porcelain Painter to the King,” standing out among the many women artists who gained commissions, sales, titles and other forms of recognition from the new administration.

Personal life Jaquotot was born in Paris in 1772 to a bourgeois family. Little is known of her childhood.

On the 17 of June, 1794, Jaquotot married her painting instructor, Étienne-Charles Le Guay, an artisan working for Dihl & Guérard. They had no children, and through mutual agreement, divorced in june 1801

In 1830, Jaquotot began a relationship with Isidore Pinet, an acquaintance of one of her Parisian sub-tenants. The precise date of their marriage is unknown, but in 1840 Pinet persuaded her to relocate with him to Toulouse. He died there in the spring of 1848. Jaquotot remained in Toulouse until her death in 1855 :53. She would immediately enter into the workshops of their commercial rivals, the Sèvres manufactory. Sèvres (1801-1840) Jaquotot's first major Sèvres commission was the "Service Olympique", a service consisting of 16 pieces, varying from vases, plates, and tea cups, all decorated with allegorical figures from Roman mythology. She began working on the service towards the end of the Consulate and finished it in its entirety in september 1806. It was selected to be part of a diplomatic gift from Napoleon to Tsar Alexander of Russia celebrating the signing of the Treaty of Tilsitt. Today, the Service Olympique is in the collection of the Kremlin Museum in Moscow

Travels (1825-1840) Then one of the few lauded female members of the Sèvres artisanat, Jaquotot often travelled out of France to draw inspiration from great European masterpieces and in some cases, copy them. Her first excursion, according to archival material, was in 1825 to Switzerland. She frequently corresponded with Alexandre Brongniart over the course of her travels, detailing what she had seen and what she intended to copy. She would also make a journey to Munich in 1832, writing: "It took the irresistible allure of all the masterpieces in Munich to persuade me to prolong my absence, even at this moment when I must get back to Paris to finish my Raphael (her copy of La Belle Jardinière)" :29In 1835, Alexandre Brongniart wrote to the Count of Montalivet, the Minister of the Interior at the time, to recommend that Marie-Victoire should make a Sèvres mandated trip to Italy in order to make copies of the masterpieces there: "You will judge, Monsieur le Comte, the importance of the difficulties of this art (porcelain painting), that one should only copy paintings of the first merit [...]. One should only allow artists possessing the talent of this art and the practice of colours at the highest degree, to paint such delicate copies." :29

Between 1839-1840, Jaquotot made her mandated tour of Italy, notably the cities of Turin, Milan, Florence, and Parma, to see the masterpieces of Renaissance and Mannerist masters. She wrote some 44 letters (now lost) to Lucas Montigny, her local prefect, detailing her journeys :29. Whilst in Bologna in 1837, Jaquotot produced a copy of Raphael's Saint Cecilia. :31

In 1840, upon return from Italy, she would make a stop in Toulouse, where she would stay with Isidore Pinet, a friend which she would go on to marry in the same decade. He persuaded her to relocate there, and in doing so, end her affiliation with the Sèvres manufactory. She would remain in Toulouse until her death in 1855.

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