Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun was a French painter. She earned an international reputation for her stylish portrayals of royalty and aristocratic society in France and throughout Europe during the period 1775–1825; before the outbreak of the French Revolution she was closely associated with Marie-Antoinette and the taste of the Ancien Régime. After 1789 she continued her highly lucrative career abroad, enjoying celebrity as one of the most successful portrait painters of her era. Her memoirs provide an intimate account of the life of a woman artist working in the orbit of the French court in the late 18th century.

Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun was the daughter of Louis Vigée (1715–67), a pastellist who specialized in portraits. She studied with P. Davesne ( fl 1764–96) and Gabriel Briard (1729–77), and by copying Old Masters. In addition, she received encouragement and advice from Joseph Vernet. By the age of 15 she had already developed a modest clientele for her portraits; on 25 October 1774 she became a member of the Académie de St Luc. On 11 January 1776 she married the art dealer Jean-Baptiste Le Brun; she exhibited her work at the Hôtel de Lubert, their house in Paris, and the salons that she held there provided her with important contacts.The list that Vigée Le Brun kept of her paintings documents the increasingly high social status of her sitters. Her ceremonial portrait of Charles-Henri-Othon, Prince of Nassau (1776; Indianapolis, IN, Mus. A.) employed the traditional appointments, idealized interior setting and elegant stance that had been used by earlier 18th-century portrait painters such as Louis Tocqué to convey the sitter’s nobility. In that same year she received her first royal commissions, portraits of one of the brothers of Louis XVI. A trip to the Netherlands and Flanders in 1781 deepened her admiration for Rubens, whose technical practices she began to emulate, switching from canvas supports to panel and experimenting with a warmer range of colours and the use of multiple, thin layers of transparent or translucent paint. Her Self-portrait in a Straw Hat (1782; priv. col.) was based directly on Rubens’s portrait of Susanna Fourment (‘Le Chapeau de Paille’, c. 1622–5; London, N.G.). In this work Vigée Le Brun introduced a note of informality that she later used to advantage in portraying fashionable aristocratic demeanour, particularly of women. In such works as the Duchesse de Polignac (1783; Waddesdon Manor, Bucks, NT), who is portrayed standing at a piano, and the elegant portrait of two friends, the Marquise de Pezay and the Marquise de Rougé with her Sons, she employed delicately animated poses, expressive faces and fashionable dress to convey the refinement and grace of Ancien Régime society. Through her smooth handling of the paint in areas of drapery she conveyed the substance of different materials without being excessively naturalistic. In contrast, details like lace edging or embroidery were carefully observed, yet loosely painted, adding visual interest to the work. The faces were finely modelled, with vitality imparted to the skin tones through a delicate layering of colour, especially in the shadows. Vigée Le Brun’s contemporaries noted her characteristic preference for striking colour combinations; for example she would accent deep midnight blues in either clothing or background with vermilion or orange areas. In the 1780s she began to employ thin, openly brushed monochromatic backgrounds, similar to those seen in Jacques-Louis David’s portraits from the 1790s, and this novel treatment heightened the vitality of the subjects’ faces. Some of the exoticism of her female sitters derives from the original costumes and headdresses that she herself often designed or concocted (e.g. Catherine, Countess Skavronsky, 1790; Paris, Mus. Jacquemart-André). Vigée Le Brun’s awareness of her female subjects’ affectations, and her ability to flatter them, can be gauged from the contrasting directness and intensity of her portraits of men, such as that of Hubert Robert (1788; Paris, Louvre) or of Alexander Charles Emmanuel de Crussol-Florensac (1787; New York, Met.).

In 1788 Vigée Le Brun was first granted favour and patronage by Marie-Antoinette. Until 1783 she exhibited her work—portraits, self-portraits and allegories of the arts—at the Académie de St Luc and the Salon de la Correspondence, the only venues then available to her. Vernet, whose portrait she painted in 1778 (Paris, Louvre), proposed her admission to the Académie Royale, but Jean-Baptiste Pierre, Premier Peintre du Roi, objected on the grounds that her husband was a dealer; and it was only through royal intervention that she was admitted to membership of the Académie on 31 May 1783, the same day as her rival Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. They filled the two remaining places of the four allotted to women. Vigée Le Brun’s morceau de réception, Peace Bringing Back Plenty (1780; Paris, Louvre) was a history painting, demonstrating her ambition to be considered as one of the highest class of painter. She painted some 30 portraits of Marie-Antoinette, varying in attire and bearing. One of 1783 that portrayed the Queen ‘en gaulle’, in a simple gauzy dress (Darmstadt, Princess von Hessen & bei Rehin priv. col.) was criticized as indecorous, and was replaced during the 1783 Salon by another portrait (untraced) that featured a more formal gown. In 1785 Vigée Le Brun received an official commission for a portrait of Marie-Antoinette and her Children, which was intended to counter the increasing criticism of the Queen as frivolous and wayward; by depicting her surrounded by her affectionate children, Vigée Le Brun portrayed Marie-Antoinette as a devoted, virtuous mother and wife. The painting’s overall pomp and splendour presented a dignified image of Marie-Antoinette as sovereign, in direct contrast to Adolf Ulric Wertmüller’s vacuous image (1785 Salon; Stockholm, Nmus.) of the Queen strolling with her children in the gardens of Versailles. The politically sensitive nature of this image may be gauged from the artist’s decision to withhold the painting from the opening days of the 1787 Salon. For such work she was paid considerably more than her contemporaries, even the history painters, and this ability to command extraordinary fees persisted throughout her career. Until 1791 she exhibited regularly at the annual Salon, and critics were generally complimentary; but because of her association with Marie-Antoinette, she became early in 1789 the victim of a slanderous press campaign. Distressed by these attacks on her private life and by the increasingly violent progress of the Revolution, in October 1789 she left France with Jeanne-Julie-Louise Le Brun (1780–1819), her only child, for what were to be 12 years of exile and travel.

Vigée Le Brun’s first destination was Italy, where she stayed until 1793, moving in court circles in Turin, Rome, and particularly Naples, which was ruled by Ferdinand I (1751–1825), married to Marie-Antoinette’s sister Caroline (1752–1814). There Vigée Le Brun painted portraits of many English tourists, such as Frederick Augustus Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol . She also visited Florence and Venice. In Florence in 1790 she contributed to the celebrated grand-ducal collection of artists’ self-portraits in the Uffizi a Self-portrait (in situ) that is a quintessential image of a painter at work at an easel, wearing an informal bonnet and holding a palette and a fistful of brushes; at the same time the artist signalled her femininity through the careful depiction of her elaborate ruffled lace collar and the colourful accent of her sash. When this portrait was exhibited in Rome in the same year, it was rapturously received, and earned Vigée Le Brun election to the Accademia di S Luca. In other self-portraits she addressed her role as a tender mother; thus in two portrayals of Madame Vigée Le Brun and her Daughter (1786 and 1789; both Paris, Louvre) she is seen embracing her little girl; in the latter version both are in Grecian dress.

There followed invitations to Vienna (1793–4) and then Prague, Dresden and Berlin. In each city Vigée Le Brun received numerous commissions from a noble clientele. From 1795 to 1801 she lived in St Petersburg except for a five-month stay in Moscow beginning in October 1800. Even though the Empress Catherine II found fault with her work, Vigée Le Brun prospered, painting for members of the imperial family and for the Russian nobility. In 1800 she became an honorary associate of the St Petersburg Academy. During that period she modernized her repertory to include portraits set in romantic landscape, suggesting the pleasure of solitude in natural settings, popularized by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; examples of such works are Countess Potocka and Countess Bucquoi . Although many of Vigée Le Brun’s Russian works either repeated or were reminiscent of her earlier compositions—her oeuvre in general being complicated by a large number of copies, replicas and imitations—a number of the portraits displayed a new intensity and spareness very much in keeping with the Romantic era’s emphasis on the individual. In these, solitary figures in relatively modest attire gaze directly at the viewer. Placed against subtly modulated plain backdrops, they convey intelligence or personality. After Vigée Le Brun’s departure from France her name had been placed on the list of émigrés, whose citizenship was thereby revoked and property confiscated. Her husband tried to defend her, publishing in 1793 a pamphlet entitled Précis historique de la vie de la Citoyenne Le Brun, but he was forced to divorce her in 1794, on pain of forfeiting their possessions. In 1799 fellow artists circulated a petition, which was granted the following year, requesting that her name be removed from the list of émigrés. Once her citizenship had been restored, Vigée Le Brun returned to France, initially for a brief period preceded by a six-month stay in Berlin. She spent 1802 in France, working on paintings begun during her Russian period. Saddened by the post-revolutionary atmosphere, she then moved to London (1803–5), where her list of clients for portraits included the poet Lord Byron and the Prince of Wales (later George IV). In the summer of 1805 she returned to France for good, except for brief trips in 1807 and 1808 to Switzerland, where she visited Mme de Staël, whose portrait she painted. After 1809 Vigée Le Brun divided her time between Paris and a country house in Louveciennes, and once more began to hold popular salons; her husband died in 1813 and her daughter in 1819. She continued to paint, though sporadically, sending works to the Salons of 1817 and 1824. In 1829 she produced a short manuscript autobiography for a friend, Princess Natalie Kourakin, and in 1834–5, with the aid of her nieces and friends, she expanded her recollections into Souvenirs.

reference: Kathleen Nicholson