AN IMPERIAL COLLECTION: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum

This collection of 15 women artists opens an appealing portal into the male-dominated Russian art world of the past few centuries. Pomeroy, curator of painting and sculpture at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Blakesley, a lecturer in art history at Cambridge, avoid the trap of arbitrarily grouping these women for the sake of a solid theme. Instead, they provide running biographical narratives for the painters, the sitters and the society they inhabited, arranged in more or less chronological sections covering 18th- and 19th-century works. The full-color images feature a multitude of women in satin and curls, but the often generic-seeming portraits have a complex iconography that the authors carefully unpack. Published to coincide with St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary, the detailed histories of these women reexamine the cultural life of the city by tracing the paths these works took on their way to the Hermitage. Readers learn that Christina Robertson ate a cold breakfast and refused a full luncheon while painting, and how much she was paid for her portrait of the Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna (1,572 rubles). Also included is Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Marie-Antionette's favorite painter, who later escaped the French Revolution, ending up in St. Petersburg, and Angelica Kauffman, who never actually lived in Russia, but whose work Russian Emperor Paul I collected. As the first book to put these women artists, largely unkown to U.S. aficionados, side by side, it offers a broad picture of a significant group of artists boldly working within (or with an eye toward) Mother Russia. (Feb.)