ANNE VALLAYER - CosTER was considered the foremost French still-life painter of her generation. One of only four women elected to the Academic royale de peinture et de sculpture in the years preceding the French Revolntion, Vallayer-Coster won the acclaim of critics and the patronage of the queen, Marie-Antoinette. Yet her achievements have in ensuing years gone largely unheralded and underappreciated and, remarkably, this is the first major exhibition dedicated to her art. In it,and in this accompanying publication, we explore her importance to the genre of still-life painting, her relationship to other still-life painters of the period, the cultural and political worlds of late- eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century France in which she was involved, and the position of herself and other women as artists and patrons in the decades surrounding the French Revolution.