Adèle de Romance, dite Romany : 1769-1846

Exhibition at the Fragonard Museum, Grasse, 14 June – 12 October 2025

The illegitimate daughter of a marquis, Adèle de Romance (1769–1846) was only recognised at the age of eight and guided by her father in her artistic and personal choices. After her father fled France in 1791 and her divorce from miniaturist François Antoine Romany in 1793, the artist was forced to live solely from her art and to forget her partly aristocratic origins. She then established herself as a portraitist, brilliantly capturing the desire to reinvent the self. At a time when portraiture was acquiring political and social value, Adèle de Romance found her place thanks to her talent, giving visibility to faces and identities in search of recognition and renewal.

This exhibition catalogue pays tribute to an artist who was able to assert herself in a male-dominated world and leave her mark on the history of portraiture. It includes part of the rich corpus preserved in the collections of the Comédie-Française and rarely exhibited, as well as numerous portraits loaned by the descendants of the models.