[1] Despite the low status that still life painting had at this time, Vallayer-Coster's highly developed skills, especially in the depiction of flowers, soon generated a great deal of attention from collectors and other artists.

Vallayer-Coster seems not to have entered the studio of a professional painter, possibly because such an apprenticeship to an unrelated male was difficult for a respectable woman.

Like other women artists of the time, she was effectively trained by her father; but also learned from other sources including the botanical specialist Madeleine Basseport, and the celebrated marine painter Joseph Vernet.

[10] Shortly thereafter, in the presence of Marie Antoinette at the courts of Versailles, she married Jean-Pierre Silvestre Coster (1745–1824), a wealthy lawyer, parlementaire, and respected member of a powerful family from Lorraine.

There is evidence that during this period of decline in Vallayer-Coster's career, she worked for the Gobelins Tapestry factory as a means to continue her artistic endeavors.

[12] In this, her last exhibited painting, she managed what an expert called "a summation of her career"[1] depicting most of her previous subjects together in a work she donated to the restored King Louis XVIII.

There is some evidence that Vallayer-Coster gave it to the king as an expression of her joy as a loyal Bourbon supporter through the turbulent years of the Revolution and Napoleonic imperialism.

While accepting this limitation in order to gain admission to the academy, the main conduit of royal patronage, Vallayer-Coster devoted her formidable technical abilities to the still life, creating works of undeniable seriousness and real visual interest.

[13] According to the art historian Marianne Roland Michel, it was the "bold, decorative lines of her compositions, the richness of her colors and simulated textures, and the feats of illusionism she achieved in depicting wide variety of objects, both natural and artificial"[11] that drew the attention of the Royal Académie and the numerous collectors who purchased her paintings.

The critic John Haber, who describes her work as lacking inwardness, says that the solidity and reassuring materiality of her compositions appealed to elite bankers and aristocrats, who could appreciate her rendering of "contrasting veneers of different woods" or "an extravagant collection of coral and shells, things that took years to come into being and will last for decades to come.

"[2] In 2002-2003 more than thirty-five of Vallayer-Coster's paintings, which were provided by both museums and private collectors of France and the United States, were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, The Frick Collection, and the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nancy.

[1][12] The exhibition included additional works by Chardin, her elder and the celebrated master of still life painting, and her contemporary Henri-Horace Roland Delaporte, among others.