Marie-Élisabeth Cavé

After she was widowed, she taught drawing to young women and published two teaching pamphlets on drawing and colour during the Second French Empire. She later also published reflections on women's conduct and place in society.

Training under Clément Boulanger and Camille Roqueplan is recorded. The recorded working language is French. The field of work recorded is visual arts, painting and visual art education. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are portrait. Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres are recorded as an influence. Places of work recorded in the authority are Paris.

• Name — Madame Cavé • Birth Name — Marie-Élisabeth Blavot • Born — 1809 or 1810 • Birthplace — Paris, France • Died — 1883 • Place of death — Neuilly-sur-Seine, France • Education — By Clément Boulanger and Camille Roqueplan • Style — Romanticism • Spouse — Clément Boulanger Hygin-Auguste Cavé

Born in Paris, she was the daughter of Rentier (property owner), and her family was related to that of Charles Leclerc, first husband of Pauline Bonaparte. She was raised at a boarding school for young girls, where she learned drawing and watercolour under Camille Roqueplan, then genre painting under Clément Boulanger, a student of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who painted Boulanger's portrait around 1830. She and Boulanger married in 1831—they had had a son together in Rome the previous year named Albert. Cautious, beautiful and charming, she managed to live an independent life and her career as a painter continued without interruption until 1855. From 1836 she gave lessons in drawing and painting in a school for young girls. In 1833 she met Eugène Delacroix at a ball—four years later he offered her a small painting, Charles Quint at the Monastery of Yuste (18 x 26 cm). She and Delacroix travelled to Flanders together in 1839 and they remained close until his death. Her husband was appointed artist to Charles Texier's archaeological mission, which was sent to excavate Magnesia ad Sipylum (now Manisa in Turkey). He died there on 28 September 1842 and the following year she married Edmond Cavé, twelve years her senior. She continued teaching and writing, gaining a certain notoriety under the name Madame Cavé and obtaining several official commissions to produce paintings for churches. Although her husband's position between 1843 and 1852 certainly proved useful to her artistic career, it was not the decisive influence upon it as some writers have argued. She effectively exhibited at the Paris Salon and gained critical acclaim before her marriage to Cavé and her career and official commissions continued after the 1848 French Revolution had cost Cavé his post and after Cavé's death in 1852. Other authors attribute her notoriety to her intimate relationship with Delacroix, though this too can be argued against—she was in contact with the whole artistic milieu of her era and able to understand her artistic contemporaries as an artist herself.

She exhibited at the Paris Salon several times and gained quite a favourable critical reputation, though critics praised her for not stepping beyond her rôle and talent as a woman. She herself wrote in 1850 "for too often ideas of great painting, of history painting, as it's called in our own times, come to trouble [the minds of young girls]. The ambition to equal men, to compete with them, destroys them." In 1847 she exhibited paintings of children—"its touch is light and its colour luminous—she likes beautiful shimmering fabrics and coquettish adjustments, and the luxury of ornaments of the old courts". In 1863 she exhibited "lively watercolours, in high colour and with a wholly masculine energy" at the permanent exhibition organised from that year onwards.

Aged 60, she seems to have abandoned painting and in 1866 she founded a society aiming to relieve women who had fallen into poverty and "were not used to the misery" of living off a wage—this was known as the "Corporation des abeilles" ("the Corporation of Bees"). They were able to produce "ouvrages de dame" (i.e. artworks suitable for women to produce) which could then be sold to society figures.

Alexandre Dumas (père) made her a character in one of the chapters of his memoirs, published between 1852 and 1856, in which he interwove some facts agreeing with historical documents with other contradictory, incoherent and mostly unverifiable ones. He portrayed her as a mad romantic young woman, a married artist and cousin of her first husband Boulanger, to whom Dumas dedicated the chapter. It was initially published in Dumas' journal Le Mousquetaire9 December 1853 then in the review L'Artiste in 1856.

• Conversation around the bed (attributed to her), Musée Magnin, Dijon • The Final Moments (attributed to her), Musée Magnin, Dijon

• The Battle of Ivry, Musée du Louvre • Louis XIII, winner of a tournament at the Louvre, Musée du Louvre

• The Vision of the Virgin, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen • The Dormition of the Virgin, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

• For François de Harlay (par l'ordre de Monseigneur), Catéchisme, ou Abrégé de la foi, L. Curmer, 1842