| Marie-Thérèse Reboul-Vien | |
| Birth Date: | 26 February 1735 |
| Birth Place: | Paris, France |
| Death Place: | Paris, France |
| Nationality: | French |
| Field: | Painting, engraving |
| Works: | Two Pigeons on a Tree Branch (1762) |
Marie-Thérèse Reboul (26 February 1735—4 January 1806),[1] [2] commonly called Madame Vien,[3] was a French painter and engraver of natural history subjects, still lifes, and flowers.
In 1757, Marie-Thérèse Reboul married the painter Joseph-Marie Vien, who was nineteen years older.[2] [3] Nineteenth-century sources state that she was taught by her husband,[4] but Joseph-Marie Vien's autobiography does not mention it.[3] She may have been a student of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte. Prior to her marriage, Reboul-Vien engraved specimens for Sénégal: Coquillages (1757) by the French naturalist Michel Adanson and Dissertation sur le papyrus (1758) by the French antiquarian Anne Claude de Caylus.[3]
Reboul-Vien was one of only fifteen women to be accepted as full academicians in the 145-year history of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris.[4] She was admitted in 1757, the same year in which she married Joseph-Marie Vien. It had been 37 years since the last woman, Rosalba Carriera, became an academician.[3] Reboul-Vien's husband was a prominent member of the Académie, which likely led to her acceptance.[5] At the time, Reboul-Vien was described as "a painter of miniatures and gouaches specializing in flowers, butterflies and birds."[6] Her reception piece was Two Pigeons Pigeons on a Tree Branch, which she submitted to the Académie in 1762.[7]
She exhibited her works at the Salons of 1757, 1759, 1763, 1765, and 1767.[8] These included watercolors of a hen with her chicks, a kestrel killing a small bird, a golden pheasant from China, a brooding pigeon, and a bird of prey following a butterfly. At the Salon of 1767, Denis Diderot praised A Crested Hen Watching over Her Chicks as a "very handsome small painting" that was "painted with great vigor and coloristic truth ... Everything's right, including the bits of straw scattered around the hen."[9] He concluded, more critically, "I'm surprised by her hen; I didn't think she was this accomplished."[9] Even so, reviews of Reboul-Vien's works were mostly positive.[3] Several of her works were acquired by Catherine the Great.[10] By the late the nineteenth century, few of her watercolors could be located.[4]