The daughter of a Gobelins’ goldsmith and jeweller, Anne Vallayer-Coster most likely trained with her father as well as with the painter Joseph Vernet and the botanist Madeleine Basseport. Aged twenty-six, Vallayer-Coster was both agréée and reçue at the Académie Royale as genre painter and sculptor on 28 July. [1] Her participation at the Salon the following year was the beginning of the artist’s lifetime success as still-life painter. Flower paintings like ours were the most appreciated of her compositions.
Vallayer-Coster was also a portraitist painter, however, the rise of portrait painters with the calibre of “Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun led to comparisons unfavourable to Vallayer-Coster, who then devoted herself to the genre in which her superiority was recognized”; that is still lifes.[2]
In 1779, with the intervention of Marie Antoinette, Vallayer-Coster obtained a studio at the Louvre, becoming the first woman to have single lodging under the Grand Gallery.[3] Among her neighbours were Joseph Vernet, her mentor and teacher, and, notably, Gérard van Spaendonck. Her marriage contract to the lawyer Jean-Pierre Sylvestre Coster in 1781 was witnessed by the Queen and signed by Pierre, Premier Peintre de Sa Majesté, and the comte d'Angiviller, Directeur général des Bâtiments.[4] Afterwards, she continued
exhibiting under her maiden name “Vallayer”.

[1] Kahng and Roland Michel at pp. 16-17 and nn. 32-33.
[2] Marianne Roland Michel, Vallayer-Coster [née Vallayer], Anne, Grove Art Online, 2003, p. 1.
[3] Kahng and Roland Michel, p. 19.
[4] Ibid.