The (in)visible woman: portraying Marie-Jacob Godefroid, restauratrice in eighteenth-century Paris

This essay uses the modest portrait of a prominent art restorer in Paris circa 1755, Marie-Jacob Godefroid, to consider how women strategically mediated their professional visibility behind a veil of feminine respectability. Combining cultural histories of female patronage, widowhood, and painting restoration in pre-revolutionary Paris, it argues that Godefroid’s portrait disguised her activeness within royal-administrative and commercial realms of art behind the benign appearance of a dowager.