Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Marie Gabrielle Capet and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard; oil on canvas, roughly 83 x 59 inches (210 x 151 cm). Link is to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the original in its collection and offers zoomable and downloadable images.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard was one of only four female students allowed into France’s Académie Royale when she was there in the 1780s. (Another was Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.)

While it’s of course unlikely that she painted while dressed this way, it was common at the time for artists whose self-portraits showed them working to appear in their finest.

[I’ve taken the liberty of brightening the Met’s image. While I haven’t seen the original of this painting, it’s been my experience — based on images of work that I have seen in person — that museums often display images of works in their collections that are much darker than the original paintings. This appears deliberate, though I don’t know the reasoning behind it.]

Matin à Villeneuve (Morning in Villeneuve), Henri Biva; oil on canvas, roughly 59 x 49 in. (151 x 125 cm); link is to Wikimedia Commons; original is in a private collection

French painter Henri Biva, who was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, gives us a beautifully idyllic scene of mprning on either a lake or a very calm river, I don’t know which.

Villeneuve is the former name of an area in Switzerland.

I particulary admire Biva’s facility with atmosphereic perspective. He pushes the far shore way back, but if you look at the large crops, you can see he’s given the area a good bit of texture and detail.

Just behind the bright patch of foliage at the edge of the far shore — pretty much directly in the center of the painting — you can see part of an arched bridge (images above, third down).

For more info, see my previous post on Henri Biva.