Catherine Lusurier

Catherine Lusurier was a French painter, active in Paris in the second half of the eighteenth century, working primarily in portraiture. She was the niece of the painter Hubert Drouais (1699 to 1767) and was apprenticed in his workshop until his death. She then continued to live with his widow, Marie-Marguerite Lusurier, on the rue des Orties in the parish of Saint-Roch, Paris, and is thought to have worked alongside Hubert's son, the portraitist Francois-Hubert Drouais, and possibly his grandson Jean-Germain Drouais. No school or formal degree is documented; her training appears to have consisted entirely of this studio apprenticeship.

Sources disagree slightly on her birth year: Wikipedia gives 1752, while the Milwaukee Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art give circa 1753. No source supplies an exact day or month of birth. She died on 11 January 1781, per Wikipedia, at about 28 years old; the year 1781 and her age at death are corroborated by the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and Christie's, though the exact day is not independently repeated outside Wikipedia. She is understood to have died in Paris, consistent with her Paris-based life and career, though no source states the place of death explicitly. The Philadelphia Museum of Art notes that an obituary in a major arts journal of the time claimed that, had she lived, she might have become one of France's most famous female artists.

Roughly twenty-one paintings have been attributed to her, concentrated in portraits of children and young artists. Signed works are rare; the most important is the Portrait of Jean-Germain Drouais, now in the Musee du Louvre, Paris (inv. 6406), which serves as the principal comparison point for other attributions.

The consistent theme across specialist commentary is how little documentary material survives. Christie's catalogue note for Portrait of a young artist states plainly that "very little is known about Catherine Lusurier, who lived to be just 28 years old," language that art historian Bendor Grosvenor repeated in Art History News in 2025, reporting on the same Christie's sale. The principal scholarly source on her life and work is Helen Ashmore's 2001 Apollo article, "Catherine Lusurier (1752 to 81): A woman painter in eighteenth-century Paris," which auction houses continue to cite when reconstructing her oeuvre. The strong 2025 result and the renewed attention it drew reflect a broader push to recover Ancien Regime women painters whose work was historically misattributed or absorbed into their male relatives' studios.

Lusurier's market is thin but active. Her all-time auction record is Portrait of a young artist, an oil on canvas that sold for USD 478,800 at Christie's New York on 20 May 2025, well above its estimate of USD 60,000 to 80,000. The same painting had previously set her prior record at Sotheby's on 3 December 1997, selling for USD 160,000, roughly a third of the 2025 price. A further work, Portrait of a Young Draftsman, came to auction at Christie's on 11 June 2026 with a considerably lower estimate of EUR 20,000 to 30,000; its realized price has not been publicly disclosed, and nothing in the record suggests it approached the 2025 high. The current record therefore still reflects a single strong result for a single painting rather than a broad, repeat-sale trend.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Lusurier, and her surviving body of work is very small, so attribution is unusually consequential: many paintings associated with her name are "attributed to" rather than signed, and connoisseurs lean on comparison to the signed Louvre portrait to support or challenge individual attributions. Her trading history is extremely thin, with essentially one significant recent auction result setting the current record, so that price should be read as a single data point rather than a stable market curve. No gallery or estate currently represents her; her paintings surface through major auction houses such as Christie's and Sotheby's and are tracked on secondary-market platforms including Artsy, Invaluable, and MutualArt.