VIGÉE LE BRUN painted her first portrait of Marie-Antoinette in 1778, Marie-Antoinette “en robe à paniers”. This
is a full-length, formal representation of the queen in court regalia,
wearing a splendidly decorated white satin hoopskirt. While the portrait
brilliantly demonstrates Vigée Le Brun’s virtuosity as a court painter,
it reveals little of its subject. But it was eminently in keeping with a
tradition of formal portraiture of the spouse of a monarch. The portrait
was executed for the queen’s brother, Emperor Joseph II, and Marie-
Antoinette was so pleased with it that she ordered two copies: one for
Catherine II, Empress of all Russias, and the other for her own apartments
at Versailles.
During the first sitting for this portrait Vigée Le Brun was enormously
intimidated, but the queen spoke to her with reassuring kindness
and graciousness. This marked the beginning of a growing
personal relationship between the artist and the monarch, who was then
in the full bloom of her youth and beauty. In her memoir Vigée Le
Brun speaks glowingly and nostalgically of the sensitivity and consideration
with which Marie-Antoinette invariably treated her, and offers several examples of the friendship and intimacy that were soon established
between these two women with such disparate backgrounds. Having
learned that Vigée Le Brun had a pleasing singing voice, Marie-
Antoinette, who loved music although she herself was not endowed
with a particularly good voice, would almost always conclude their
sessions by joining with her in a duo.

One of their favorite composers was André Grétry, a master of eighteenth-century opéra comique whose works combined the melodic grace of Italian opera with the dramatic interest of the French.
On one occasion Vigée Le Brun unexpectedly missed an appointment
for a sitting; pregnant at the time, she felt too ill to make the trip to Versailles. The following day she hurried to Versailles to ofer her apologies. The queen did not expect her and was finishing her toilette before taking a ride in her carriage. Upon learning that her portraitist had come to make an appointment for another day, she readily received her and, after gently chiding her, gave orders to cancel her promenade for a sitting: “I remember that in my eagerness to respond to this kindness, I seized my paintbox with such a rush that it spilled; my brushes
fell on the floor; I kneeled down . . . ‘Leave everything,’ said the Queen,
‘You are too advanced in your pregnancy to bend down.’ And she then
proceeded to pick up everything herself ”.
Gradually Vigée Le Brun became the queen’s favorite artist and
portraitiste en titre, and in this capacity she was able to
exercise increasing freedom in her style of portraiture. For instance, the
1783 portrait known as Marie-Antoinette “en gaule”  is a closeup
and intimate three-quarter-length portrait of an attractive young
woman wearing an informal white muslin dress and a broad-rimmed,
plumed hat. She is holding a rose in her left hand. When exhibited in
the Salon the portrait provoked unflattering comments, and wagging
tongues maliciously spread the rumor that the queen had had herself
painted in her nightgown.

Rose Bertin, the queen’s dressmaker, had urged her to give up the
sti¤ formal court dress in favor of loose-fitting, simple gowns of white
cotton or muslin, and the queen was eager to give up the enormous
hooped skirts and the elaborately structured coi¤ures. She banished
them from the court, except for special occasions. Vigée Le Brun, for
her part, eagerly welcomed this opportunity to represent the queen not
merely as an impersonal symbol of royalty, but as a woman in all her
appealing and vulnerable femininity. This unexpectedly unconventional
representation of the queen of France was not well received, and it provoked
something of a scandal and even contributed to her growing
unpopularity and to the spreading of malicious gossip about her moral
character.
In Souvenirs Vigée Le Brun presents a striking portrait of the queen
in her prime. She describes her as tall and admirably well proportioned,
with a natural majesty in her demeanor: “Her features were not regular;
she had inherited from her family a narrow oval face peculiar to the
Austrian nation. She had rather small eyes bluish in tinge; her gaze was
both witty and gentle, her nose fine and pretty, and her mouth not too
large, although her lips were a bit too full. But what is most remarkable
in her face is her complexion. I have never seen anything so brilliant, and
brilliant is the right word, for her skin was so transparent that it did not
catch any shadow. As a result, I could never render its e¤ect satisfactorily.
Colors failed me to paint this freshness, these unbelievably subtle
tones that I have never found in any other woman”.
Vigée Le Brun was indeed proud of the close relationship she was
able to establish with the queen, and her intention was doubtless to
demonstrate the fact that an absolute monarch could properly honor
and further the career of an artist, a tradition going back to the Italian
Renaissance. What was unusual in this case was that the relationship
was between two women. In spite of their very disparate social situations,
they shared mutual respect and sympathy and probably also a common sense of frustration as unhappily married women and as targets
of increasingly vicious calumnies, one as a foreigner — l’Autrichienne
(the Austrian woman) — and the other as a woman artist intent on making
a name for herself in a world overwhelmingly dominated by men.
Indeed their friendly relationship fed the prevalent malicious rumors
about the queen’s purported promiscuity, questionable sexuality, and
lesbian tendencies. That one of her favorite and intimate companions
was the lovely Duchess Yolande de Polignac greatly contributed
to these rumors.
As for the painter’s attachment to her royal subject, it remained
fiercely loyal, especially after Marie-Antoinette’s cruel death. In her
memoir Vigée Le Brun is obviously intent on rehabilitating the queen’s
reputation by recounting several anecdotes intended to underscore her
kindly, generous nature and the goodness of her heart, especially in her
dealings with ordinary people, as when she made sure that her daughter,
Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France, then aged six, properly honored a
little peasant girl whom she had invited to dinner by serving her first.
Vigée Le Brun was commissioned to paint a large number of portraits
of Marie-Antoinette, both formal and informal. In each case she
was consistently able to convey a sympathetic, vivid representation of a
queen as a sensitive, thoughtful young woman. Even in more sumptuous,
regal portraits, such as the Marie-Antoinette “en robe de velours bleu” , she is at once a figure of quiet selfconfident authority and of dignified femininity. She is seated holding a book in her left hand, indicating her serious interests, and she lightly rests her right hand on a table bearing a vase of flowers. Her elaborate headdress is topped with ornamental plumes. The composition has a baroque, quasi-theatrical element to it, with its background of column
and drapery.

Yet the personality of the queen strongly dominates the composition.  In the famous Marie-Antoinette and Her Children, the queen is represented as a contented mother surrounded by her brood.
The composition was probably meant partially to rehabilitate Marie-
Antoinette’s tarnished image and help ward of the growing public animosity
directed at her. More importantly, it constitutes a translation in
pictorial terms of a moral and bourgeois ideal of motherhood and family
values propounded by such Enlightenment philosophes as Diderot and
Rousseau. Greuze, one of Vigée Le Brun’s mentors and supporters, had
for his part achieved great success with compositions depicting endearing
or dramatic family scenes.
In Marie-Antoinette and Her Children, Vigée Le Brun is intent on
conveying a political message by integrating this moralistic, bourgeois
ideal and family values into the context of absolute monarchy. The queen
is shown seated, gently cradling in her arms her youngest child, Louis-
Charles, Duc de Normandie, who, after his father was guillotined, became
known as Louis XVII and died under mysterious circumstances.
Standing next to their mother are, to her right, Marie-Thérèse, also
known as Madame Royale, and, to the queen’s left, Louis-Joseph, the
Dauphin, pointing at an empty cradle, a reference to Princess Sophie,
who had died shortly after her birth in 1786.
Between May and June of 1781 Vigée Le Brun accompanied her
husband on a business tour of Flanders and Holland. In addition to being
introduced to members of the high society of Brussels and viewing
some superb art collections, notably that of Charles-Joseph de Ligne,
French aristocrat, soldier, and man of letters who graciously hosted the
couple in his superb estate of Beloeil, she was especially impressed by
the magnificent Van Dycks and, above all, by the Rubens masterpieces
in Flemish churches, galleries, and private collections.
In Antwerp she came upon Rubens’s masterful portrait of his sisterin-
law, Susanna Lunden, the older sister of Hélène Fourment, who became
the painter’s second wife in 1630.

The portrait produced such an impact on her that, while still in Brussels, she
painted a self-portrait largely inspired by this composition (I, 34). It is
known as Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat.
Vigée Le Brun’s self-portrait is a worthy homage to Rubens’s brilliant
virtuosity as a colorist, and it strove to achieve similar effects of
light and color. As in the Rubens painting, the setting is out of doors,
enabling the artist to depict natural lighting, so that even the shadow of
the subject’s plumed hat barely affects the brightness of her skin. And in
her portrait there is a real chapeau de paille (straw hat), unlike Rubens’s
subject, whose hat was actually of beaver felt.

To the dashing ostrich feather the artist added a wreath of freshly picked rustic flowers. And where Susanna Lunden peers at us in a coyly indirect fashion, Vigée Le Brun directly meets our gaze with self-assurance, and her lips are partly open in an inviting smile. Unlike Rubens’s subject, whose breasts are pushed high and close together by a tight corset, Vigée Le Brun
displays a low and free décolletage. Finally, while Lunden keeps her
arms and hands demurely and idly crossed above her waist, Vigée Le
Brun extends her right hand in an open, welcoming gesture, while her
left hand firmly grips a palette and brushes, a proud and self-confident
proclamation of herself as both subject and artist.
In her memoir Vigée Le Brun notes with undisguised satisfaction
that her Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat was largely instrumental in her election
to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1783. She
emphasizes the fact that the initiative did not come from her but rather
from one of her mentors, the painter Joseph Vernet. This was
indeed a bold move, since women had never achieved this distinction.
But by then she strongly felt that she had earned this right, and her
goal was to achieve membership, not merely as portraitist, traditionally
viewed as a minor and inferior genre in the classical academic hierarchy,
but as a full-fledged history painter.
But if Vigée Le Brun had supporters among painters, she also had powerful enemies. One of the most vocal adversaries and fiercest
opponents to her election was Jean-Baptiste Pierre, now largely and
justifiably forgotten but then an influential and successful history painter
who cumulated various official functions, notably as Professor at the
Royal Academy and First Painter of the king. To be sure, the authoritarian
Pierre had his own critics, notably Diderot, who looked upon him as
the quintessential court painter who made the most of his limited talent
and lack of originality by skillfully exploiting an ability to treat and at
times plagiarize historical and religious themes. In fact, Diderot took a
mischievous pleasure in repeatedly ridiculing Pierre in his Salons.
For an exceptionally talented painter like Vigée Le Brun, election to
the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was a primary goal, for
among other privileges it would give her the right to exhibit her paintings
in the biennial Salon at the Louvre. Yet, the Académie was most
reluctant to accept women painters as members, and to relent would be
an exception to the rule. Furthermore, by tradition and law Academicians
did not engage in art-related commerce, and she could therefore
be barred from the Académie as the wife of an art dealer.
As a reception piece Vigée Le Brun submitted Peace Bringing Back
Abundance, painted in 1780, in order to demonstrate that she was fully
capable of executing this kind of allegorical painting with brilliance and
brio, and therefore that she had earned the credentials as a full-fledged
history painter and not merely as a portraitist. In spite of its traditional
symbolism, the dynamic composition has an all-embracing sweep,
and the two attractive female figures, representing peace and abundance,
respectively, are linked in a common vigorous upward motion, with the
figure of peace gently guiding and protecting peace.
On May 31, 1783, Vigée Le Brun was accorded full membership,
thanks largely to the direct intervention of Marie-Antoinette. In Souve -
nirs she minimizes the queen’s role, although she diplomatically acknowledges that both “the King and Queen had been good enough to wish to see me enter the Academy” . Her uncanny combination
of exceptional talent and astuteness had finally paid of. She had furthermore
adroitly manipulated royal patronage by paying strict adherence to
moral propriety, a timely strategy in view of Marie-Antoinette’s already
badly tainted reputation.
All the elaborate precautions Vigée Le Brun took to protect her own
public image, however, did not prevent scandalmongers from exploiting
her connection with the great and powerful. One of the malicious
rumors was that she had a sexual relationship with Count Charles-
Alexandre de Calonne, Louis XVI’s finance minister from 1783 until

1787, whose portrait she painted in 1784  and whose collection of French and Dutch masters had been largely acquired through the services of the artist’s husband-dealer.

Vigée Le Brun consistently and vigorously denied this rumor, insisting that she as an artist and Calonne as a politician had little in common and no reason for mutual attraction, and furthermore, that she hardly knew him personally. Calonne was a very busy man, and sittings for his portrait had to be shortened. Whether her protestations are entirely truthful is impossible
to ascertain. What can reasonably be assumed is that her overriding
passion throughout her life was her calling as an artist, and this was
most probably the case when, as an ambitious young painter, she was
struggling mightily and pouring all her energies into asserting herself
as a painter of the first rank.
As for Calonne, he was dismissed in 1787, for he had not only failed
in his controversial attempt to deal with the huge public debt and deteriorating financial situation by adopting a spending policy that was followed by a brief period of prosperity before a ruinous collapse, he was
also accused of misusing public money on a grand scale. Not too surprisingly,
after 1789 he was looked upon as one of the principal evildoers
of the Old Regime.
Be that as it may, Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of Calonne is a masterful
example of the o‹cial court portrait, or portrait d’apparat, which she
never theless succeeded in humanizing. The handsome,
youthful minister, bewigged and elegantly attired in black satin, poses
seated at his working desk, holding a document in his left hand and facing
us with a quiet look of authority and self-confidence.
Yet another malicious rumor that circulated was specifically intended
to damage her reputation as an artist: she was accused of not
being the actual author of the paintings attributed to her. Rather, she
allegedly received considerable help in the execution of her portraits
from more experienced male painters, notably from a respectable history
painter, François-Guillaume Ménageot. Unfortunately for Vigée Le Brun, Ména geot happened to reside in the same house on the rue de
Cléry where she and her husband also lived.
By an interesting coincidence, Vigée Le Brun’s admission to the
Académie occurred simultaneously with that of another woman artist,
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749 – 1803).Labille-Guiard had also
achieved renown as a portraitist of exceptional talent. Like Vigée Le
Brun, she, too, was the target of libelous attacks and vicious accusations,
notably that she passed o¤ as her own paintings those by François-
André Vincent, a history painter who happened to be her friend and
mentor and, eventually, her second husband.
Labille-Guiard had less facility and panache than Vigée Le Brun.
Her portraits are serious, sober, straightforward representations of their
subjects. Her color scheme is also more muted and less brilliant than that
of Vigée Le Brun. She did not idealize or flatter her subjects, who are
represented in a straightforward, uncompromising way. A good case in
point is her 1782 Self-Portrait, which, perhaps not coincidentally, was
hung next to Vigée Le Brun’s glamorous Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat at
the Salon de la Correspondance.
The two self-portraits are an interesting study in subtly contrasting
styles. Both self-portraits represent attractive young women artists holding
a palette and brushes in their left hand and facing the onlooker with
an air of quiet self-confidence. But whereas Labille-Guiard strikes a
generally demure, self-contained, and modest post, Vigée Le Brun is
far more assertive in the way she boldly asserts her femininity in her
frontal pose and boldly exposed décolletage.
Although Labille-Guiard eventually became the o‹cial portraitist
of Louis XVI’s aunts, Madame Victoire and Madame Adélaïde, this
could hardly compete with Vigée Le Brun’s spectacular success as
o‹cial portraitist of Marie-Antoinette. When both women were simultaneously elected to the Académie Royale, yet another rumor was widely circulated that, whereas Vigée Le Brun owed her election primarily to the powerful influence of Marie-Antoinette, Labille-Guiard made it
strictly on her own.
The two women ultimately came to be viewed as rivals. Vigée Le
Brun was doubtless the more fashionable painter, yet she was also the
one embroiled in controversy because of her connection with Marie-
Antoinette. Labille-Guiard never even came close to achieving Vigée Le
Brun’s celebrity and notoriety. Although gossips eagerly exploited the
rivalry, there is no evidence of personal animosity. Still, Le Brun’s remark
about some artists who “would not forgive me for being the fashion
and selling my pictures at better prices than theirs”  might be an
indirect reference. Their destinies also took very divergent paths during
the Revolution. Whereas Vigée Le Brun opted for exile, Labille-Guiard
stayed in Paris and readily espoused the revolutionary ideology.

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