A female painter from Strasbourg steps into the limelight

With a limited budget and stiff international competition, the museum’s department of fine arts is always looking for rare opportunities to acquire work in that field on the art market. This year, we were fortunate enough to acquire no less than three works by the French painter Monique Daniche (1737-1824), who was working as a much sought-after portraitist for the Strasbourg elite in the late 18th and early 19th century. Preliminary research on these portraits has revealed some remarkable stories so far.

Monique Daniche’s life and work

Little is certain about Daniche’s biography and oeuvre. We know that her father Jean Tanisch (c.1700-1775) was born near Trier and recorded living between 1736 and 1742 in the Valsesia alpine valley, where he married Monique’s Tuscan mother, Rose Rossi (c.1714-1778). Our painter was born in 1737 as Marie Monique Rose Tanisch in Varallo (Piedmont), before her family relocated to Strasbourg around 1743. Although they changed their surname to “Daniche” to make it sound more French, Monique kept signing her work as “Tanisch”. Her family was made up of painters, with her father teaching Monique and her younger siblings Ursule (1742-1822), Antoine Clément (b.1744) and Pierre (b.1752).

Almost none of their paintings are signed and it is difficult to determine which work should be attributed to which specific family member, especially since they worked together on some paintings during their careers, Monique and Ursule in particular. As no signed works by Ursule are known to date, we assume that she collaborated exclusively with her older sister, perhaps as her assistant. Both women lived and worked together in Strasbourg all their lives, did not marry and never seem to have left Alsace. The early years of their careers focused primarily on religious paintings for the altars of churches in Strasbourg and the surrounding area. With the dispossession and dispersal of church property during the political upheavals of the French Revolution, the sisters’ painting practice shifted to an entirely different genre, with Monique Daniche concentrating almost exclusively on portraiture from 1790 onwards.

Much of the information we have about the life and work of Monique Daniche was unearthed by the Strasbourg historian Alain Luttringer in a publication of Cahiers alsaciens d’archeologie, d’art et d’histoire 43 (2000). The addresses of her residences and workshops, the fact that the sisters employed a servant and lent considerable amounts of money, and an idea of the extent of Monique’s original oeuvre are entirely based on his research. Luttringer identified at least 35 works painted by Monique Daniche, with another 12 works attributed to her. Overall, it is a small artistic oeuvre, of which just over a dozen works have survived.

Madame Sans-Gêne

Her portraits, however, do shed light on some historically interesting characters Monique met during her career. This includes Charles-Louis Schulmeister (1770-1853), whose son she portrayed (the work is in a private collection). Schulmeister was a notorious spy working for Napoleon Bonaparte and lived at the same address as the Daniche sisters – the large residence of the Hôtel Gallahan, situated today in 1, rue des Récollets in Strasbourg’s old city centre. Since October 2024, the permanent presentation of Old Masters on the third floor of the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart features a portrait of a woman with a roguish look and proud appearance, famously known by her nickname “Madame Sans-Gêne”.

Catherine Lefèbvre, born Hubscher (1753-1835), was originally a laundress from Alsace, but married a skilled soldier in Napoleon’s army who ultimately became a confidant of the emperor and commander of his armies. Catherine climbed a very steep social ladder from a simple existence to the dignity of a duchess, a transformation entirely consistent with the revolutionary period in which she lived. Her frank and outspoken character endured andmade her a favourite of Napoleon. Italian actress Sophia Loren played her in one of many 20th-century stage and cinema adaptations of her life (which is often mixed up with the biography of Hubscher’s contemporary, a female soldier called Marie-Thérèse Figueur), cementing her iconic nickname for being shamelessly honest. Her portrait at the Nationalmusée dates from c. 1800 and shows Hubscher in a period marked by both prosperity and mourning – only one of her fourteen children reached adulthood. Her story is one of strength and resilience, qualities vividly captured by Monique Daniche in the compelling portrait, observing us with a twinkle in her eye and slight smile.

A stylish young couple

In the course of 2025, the museum will also present two oval companion portraits (each 76 x 62 cm) by Monique Daniche, which were offered in a recent Paris auction as Portraits of Thérèse Tionchon née Ebenstrait (married 1793) holding a sheet of music and of her husband. It was challenging to find clues in the Alsace archives and other sources about the identity of the sitters, also because in the eighteenth century surnames weren’t always spelt the same, as we have seen with Daniche. However, after some preliminary research we can now confidently identify them as Jeanne Louise Thérèse Hebenstreit (1770-1849) and Jean Nicolas Michel Tinchant (1770- 1835), a young couple from Strasbourg.

In her portrait, Thérèse is sitting in front of a pianoforte, or what appears to be a so-called pantaleon, while holding a sheet of music. Although we have not yet been able to identify the music, it must have aspecific significance to the sitter, as must the instrument. They both may refer to Pantaleon Hebenstreit (1668-1750), a famous German dance teacher, instrument maker, musician and composer. Pantaleon Hebenstreit invented a large instrument with strings, named after him, that was used all over Europe around 1700 for dance music, and can be compared to a dulcimer (a pre-form of the fortepiano). It is not yet clear if and how he is related to Thérèse Hebenstreit, but the fact that they share the same relatively uncommon family name suggests a connection. Since Jean Tinchant is portrayed in the military uniform of a non-combatant superior officer in the French army and was appointed physician in the Armée du Rhin on 15 April 1792, his portrait must have been completed after that date. Both he and Thérèse Hebenstreit came from a distinguished background: his wife’s father was a lawyer at the Alsace Supreme Court, and his own father was a surgeon and professor at the medical faculty of Strasbourg.

The occasion for being painted by one of the leading portraitists of the 18th century Strasbourg elite may very well have been the couple’s marriage on 11 February 1793 – a date that fits well with their attire and Daniche’s painting style, when compared to other works by her from that period. Another undated portrait attributed to Monique Daniche showing a young mother with a newborn baby bears a striking resemblance to Thérèse Hebenstreit and likely depicts her with Louis Auguste (1794-1871), the first son of the newly married couple and descendant of the Tinchant lineage. While this would, indeed, narrow the probable date of our companion portraits down to c.1793, we cannot rule out the possibility entirely that the portraits were painted after March 1809, when Tinchant was promoted to “Médecin principal” in Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Further research will surely reveal new findings.

Monique Daniche, like her contemporary Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, is an influential figure in the history of French female painters, but her works are rare and still largely unstudied. The fact that we can now show a representative part of this fascinating Strasbourg painter’s small oeuvre on our walls in Luxembourg is something we look forward to very much and hope to share with many visitors throughout 2025.

Text: Michelle Kleyr and Ruud Priem

Source: MuseoMag N° I - 2025