Painting of the Day: “Les Femmes Savants,” by Charles Robert Leslie, RA, 1845

Les Femmes Savants
Charles Robert Leslie, 1845
The Victoria & Albert Museum

By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, art collectors were starting to favor genre paintings of domestic or theatrical scenes which depicted sentimental and sometimes humorous themes over the historical paintings which had dominated the early part of the century.


Here, celebrated painter and member of the Royal Academy, Charles Robert Leslie addresses this shift in sensibilities by depicting a scene from a play by French playwright Moliére, “Les Femmes Savants” (The Learned Ladies). The humorous scene of the pompousness of the self-styled literary elite was quite well received at the Royal Academy.

With this painting, Leslie embarked on a successful career painting scenes from popular literature.