Madeleine Basseporte

Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, (28 April 1701 – 6 September 1780) was a French painter.

Basseporte was born and died in Paris. She became one of the pupils of Claude Aubriet thanks to her precocious talent for design. She replaced him as the Royal Painter after his death. The king Louis XV of France commissioned her to teach the princesses how to paint flowers. She served for nearly 50 years as the official botanical illustrator at the Jardin du Roi, the only woman to do so. This position required not only scientific illustration skills, but also the capacity to dissect plants and reveal their internal structures.

She collaborated with the chemist Rouelle and the sculptor Larchevêque, and studied botany with Jussieu. She later taught anatomical illustration to Marie Marguerite Bihéron, who later became a wax modeler.

Genres

Basseporte was best known as a botanical illustrator. In contact with many of the major botanists and naturalists of her time, she gained recognition for her illustrations of plants, shells, animals, birds, and sea creatures. Though adept in pastel portraiture, Basseporte chose to pursue botanical illustration because it provided a steady income with which to support her family. She worked more specifically in the genre of “peinture des plantes,” taking a scientific approach to botanical illustration that focused more on plant structure than the flower. Her work stands at the intersection of art and science.

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. There, she found influence in the works of artists such as Rosalba Carriera.

After Robert’s death, Basseporte was apprenticed to Claude Aubriet and eventually succeeded him as the official painter of the Jardin du roi. During her time at the Jardin du roi, Basseporte interacted with botanists Carolus Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, the latter with whom she corresponded regularly. Basseporte furthered her connections to the scientific community through Noel-Antoine Pluche, whose Spectacle de la nature she helped illustrate, and plant physiologist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau. Monceau, working with the Académie des sciences, served to influence Basseporte’s work during her tenure as an Académie dessinateur.

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Wikipedia