The Scientific Vision of Women

Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier was a significant contributor to the late eighteenth-century Chemical Revolution. In her youth, she cultivated an interest in natural sciences and drawing, as well as an intellectual friendship with Antoine Lavoisier, who worked with her father collecting taxes for the French monarchy. When a powerful great-uncle sought to marry off the thirteen-year-old Marie-Anne to an impoverished fifty-year-old aristocrat, her father arranged a more appealing union to Lavoisier, a mere fifteen years her senior.

Alongside his tax-collecting job, Antoine had already established an impressive reputation in French chemistry. Marie-Anne joined him in these endeavors, exemplifying the roles women played in the scientific culture of the French Enlightenment. She translated foreign-language science, documented field and laboratory research, hosted a scientific salon, and made engravings illustrating scientific publications. Following the conventions of the time, she often did not receive formal credit for this work, but she was nevertheless widely respected for it by contemporaries across Europe.

In adulthood, Marie-Anne studied drawing and painting with famed artist Jacques-Louis David and his painting of the power couple now hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Amidst the upheavals of post-revolutionary France, Marie-Anne’s husband and father were arrested, charged with corruption in their tax-collecting work, and put to death. Marie-Anne escaped the guillotine and carried on the scientific partnership, editing and publishing the first volumes of Antoine’s collected works.

Label by Patrick Charbonneau, and Evan Hepler-Smith