Labille-Guiard portrait sets auction record at Christie’s London
A newly surfaced 18th-century portrait by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard has sold for £1.1 million ($1.5 million), establishing a new auction record for the French painter and underscoring the market’s growing appetite for women artists long left outside the center of the Old Masters canon.
Portrait of Marquise Marie-Thérèse-Odile de la Valette changed hands at Christie’s London on June 30, nearly doubling its high estimate. The painting had remained in a private collection since the late 18th century, making its appearance at auction a notable event in itself. Christie’s described the work as a particularly elegant example of Labille-Guiard’s hand.
The sale arrives at a moment when the artist’s market has been building steadily. Labille-Guiard, born in 1749, was one of the first women admitted to France’s Royal Academy. She trained under Rococo pastel master Quentin de la Tour at Paris’s Académie de Saint-Luc and taught herself oil painting in her spare time, a practical decision that helped secure her place in the academy in 1783. She and Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun were accepted on the same day, and both faced criticism from male peers.
Labille-Guiard later became known for portraits of the royal family and, in 1795, became the first woman artist granted permission to establish a studio at the Louvre. After separating from her husband, she supported herself through her work and also advocated for younger women artists.
The auction result is especially striking because her work rarely appears on the market. According to the Artnet Price Database, only nine of her works have been offered publicly in the last decade. In late 2025, the Palace of Versailles acquired one of her self-portraits for €843,800 ($988,785), far above its estimate, and that purchase helped sharpen attention on her market. Between 2018 and 2025, her average sale price rose by more than 250 percent.
Christie’s Old Masters evening sale totaled £38.9 million ($51.4 million), with 90 percent of the works sold. The overall figure was lower than last year’s £55.3 million ($75.9 million), in part because last year’s sale was lifted by a Canaletto that set a new record for the artist. Even so, the Labille-Guiard result suggests that collectors are still recalibrating around artists whose reputations are only now being fully reassessed.
