Constance Mayer

Constance Mayer
Self-Portrait. Oil on canvas. Bibliothèque Marmottan
Born	Marie-Françoise-Constance Mayer-La Martinière 9 March 1775 Chauny
Died	26 May 1821 Paris
Occupation	painter

Constance Mayer (Marie-Françoise-Constance Mayer-La Martinière) (9 March 1775 in Chauny, Picardy – 26 May 1821 in Paris, France) was a French painter of portraits, allegorical subjects, miniatures and genre works. She had "a brilliant but bitter career."

Constance Mayer was the daughter of a successful government official.

Mayer painted genre scenes and portraits in her early 20s. Having studied with Joseph-Benoît Suvée and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, she adopted a style of soft brush strokes and made paintings of sentimental scenes like that of her instructors. Greuze, for instance, his daughters said that "he painted virtue, friendship and innocence, and his soul breathes through his pictures" although more objective opinions were that he painted wounded and vulnerable subjects.

Following the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, society settled into a calmer lifestyle in which miniature and portrait paintings became popular. Mayer painted portraits of women and children, family scenes, self-portraits and miniatures of her father. She attained a degree of success, exhibited Self-Portrait of Citizenness Mayer Pointing to a Sketch for a Portrait of Her Mother, and exhibited at every salon thereafter. At the 1801 salon she exhibited Self-Portrait with Artist's Father: He Points to a Bust of Raphael, Inviting Her to Take This Celebrated Painter as a Model. Sensitive to the viewpoint of women artists, Mayer had her work presented as the student of Greuze and Suvee so that they would be more acceptable to the public. She worked in Jacques-Louis David's studio in 1801 and adopted a direct and simple style under his tutelage, but still depicted sentimental scenes.

She studied with Pierre-Paul Prud'hon beginning in 1802, but they did not have the typical pupil-master relationship. In many ways there were more like peers. They had both exhibited at the salon and unlike Prud'hon, she had received a better education in art, and he was known for his talent in drawing, particularly complex historic compositions.