Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun

French painter

• Born: April 16, 1755
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: March 30, 1842
• Place of death: Paris, France

Vigée-Lebrun was one of the most celebrated artists of her time and ranks with the best portraitists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By concentrating on the personalities of her sitters, she broke with the tradition of the empty ceremonial portrait.

Early Life

Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (ay-lee-zah-beht veh-zhay-luh-bruh), born in Paris on April 16, 1755, was the daughter of Louis Vigée, a pastel portraitist and teacher at the Academy of St. Luke. From ages six to eleven, she attended a convent school, where, as she later recorded in her memoirs, she was constantly drawing whenever and wherever she could. Although, as she stated, “my passion for painting was born in me,” her father can be credited with nurturing her ambition to become an artist. During school holidays, the young Élisabeth received her first lessons in drawing and oils from her father and some of his artist friends, especially Gabriel Francis Doyen and P. Davesne, both of whom would encourage her after her father died in 1767. At this time, she also had a few drawing lessons from Gabriel Briard, whom she described as an indifferent painter but a very fine draftsman. While working in Briard’s studio in the Louvre, she met the renowned academician Joseph Vernet, who advised her not to follow any system of schools but to study only the works of the great Italian and Flemish masters. Furthermore, he urged her to work as much as possible from nature, to avoid falling into mannerisms. Taking Vernet’s advice, she studied the works of such masters as Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Raphael, and Domenichino in public and private collections in Paris, and she made her own studies from nature, using family and friends as models.

The Royal Academy in Paris excluded all women from its classes of instruction; therefore, it was no coincidence that most successful women artists of the time were daughters of artists, receiving their training in their fathers’ studios, outside the system of academic apprenticeship. Because of her father’s early death, Vigée-Lebrun was largely self-taught, having acquired her artistic education by virtue of her own willpower, discipline, and willingness to work long hours. By the time she was fifteen, she was a professional portraitist, earning barely enough money to support her mother and young brother. At age nineteen, she was licensed as a master painter by the Academy of St. Luke and was exhibiting works at the salon there.

Vigée-Lebrun’s natural instinct for innovative poses and compositions, combined with her ability to produce a flattering likeness, soon brought her many influential clients. One of the first of these was the Russian nobleman Count Ivan Shuvaloff, whose patronage helped establish her among the aristocracy. It was in 1776 that she received her first royal commission for several portraits of the king’s brother—and she also married the art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun. Her growing reputation as a painter, coupled with her own attractive personality, now drew the cream of Parisian society to the musical and literary entertainments held in her home.

Life’s Work

In 1779, Vigée-Lebrun painted the first of many portraits from life of Marie-Antoinette, with the result that her name and her art became closely associated, in the public’s mind, with the queen. Royal patronage was responsible, in fact, for Vigée-Lebrun’s election to membership in the Royal Academy. While excluding women from its classes, the Royal Academy admitted a few women as academicians, but without all the privileges given to male members. Essentially, academy membership gave a woman only two advantages: some prestige and the right to exhibit in the salons. Earlier, Vernet had proposed Vigée-Lebrun for membership, but it had been denied when Jean-Baptiste Pierre, first painter to the king, objected on the basis of her marriage to an art dealer. Her eventual acceptance in 1783 was said to be attributable to the direct intervention of the queen. Pierre, envious of both Vigée-Lebrun’s talent and her obviously favorable standing with the king and queen, then attempted to discredit her, claiming that the painter François-Guillaume Ménageot had retouched her reception piece—an allegorical painting entitled Peace Bringing Back Plenty.

Between 1783 and 1789, Vigée-Lebrun exhibited some forty portraits and history paintings in the academy’s salon, including the famous Marie Antoinette and Her Children, now in the National Museum at Versailles. Painted in 1787, this work is significant for two reasons: First, commissioned by the minister of fine arts to replace an unsatisfactorily casual portrait of the queen and her children by Adolf Wertmüller, it acknowledged Vigée-Lebrun as one of the leading artists in France. Second, it illustrates many of the most important characteristics of her mature style. Using the pyramidal composition of the Italian High Renaissance, she created a didactic work that presents the queen favorably as both ruler and mother. As she so often did, Vigée-Lebrun has translated human emotions—in this case, the love between a mother and her children—into dramatic facial expressions and gestures, while at the same time emphasizing the regal dignity of the queen. The painting illustrates the superiority of Vigée-Lebrun’s artistic intellect and technical mastery, as all details of costume and setting combine harmoniously with expression and gesture to give meaning to the work as a whole. This was the painting that she herself considered her masterpiece. It had fortunately escaped destruction when the revolutionary mobs invaded the palace at Versailles because the queen—finding the painting a too-painful reminder after the death of the young prince—had ordered it removed to a storeroom. Near the end of her long career, Vigée-Lebrun arranged for the painting to be exhibited publicly in the Museum of the History of France at Versailles, as evidence of her artistic legacy to the nation.

Given her strong Royalist convictions, Vigée-Lebrun was forced to flee Paris on the eve of the revolution. In her memoirs, she recorded the details of her flight by public coach—disguised in peasant dress and accompanied by her young daughter—on the very night the mobs dragged the king and queen from Versailles. For the next twelve years, Vigée-Lebrun worked in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Russia. Having already achieved an international reputation as a painter, she was welcomed into aristocratic circles and honored by membership in the local academy in each city she visited. Possessed of an enormous energy for work and never lacking for commissions—for which she demanded fees that no other portraitist could command—Vigée-Lebrun produced some of her best work during these years.

She continued to make her own original contributions to the art of portraiture and to the taste of the time. She retained the virtuoso, almost impressionistic, brushwork that had first appeared in the early portrait of Count Shuvaloff (1775), as well as the bold coloristic effects she had learned from studying Rubens. A good example of her work from this period is her own portrait (1790), which she was asked to add to the Grand-Ducal collection of artists’ self-portraits in the Uffizi in Florence. First exhibited in Rome, this work received wide acclaim, with the director of the French Academy there declaring it to be one of the most beautiful things Vigée-Lebrun had ever done. Other noteworthy examples include the portraits she painted in Russia, which are especially remarkable in terms of the variety of their imagery and the originality of composition, reflecting something of the exoticism and melancholy of the country itself.

Returning finally to Paris in 1801, she was received warmly but stayed only a short time, having found the city too much changed from prerevolutionary days. She went on to London and remained there for three years. Again, she found many clients among the aristocracy, including the prince of Wales. The quality, as well as the popularity, of her work aroused the jealousy of some English artists but brought praise from Sir Joshua Reynolds.

After spending a year in Switzerland, Vigée-Lebrun, now in her fifties, returned to Paris in 1805. She led a quieter life, dividing her time between Paris and her country home in Louveciennes. She painted less, apparently having lost much of the inspiration provided by her early struggles to achieve stature in the art world and the stimulus of her extensive travels, although she continued to exhibit at the salon until 1824. Her last years were spent writing her memoirs and entertaining old friends, as well as many of the leaders of the new Romantic movement. She died in Paris on March 30, 1842, at the age of eighty-six.

Significance

Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun was one of the most successful women artists of all time, achieving an artistic acclaim during her own lifetime that remained unmatched by any other woman until modern times. She excelled in a field that was popular and very competitive, but her success was not without a price. As the monarchy became more and more unpopular in prerevolutionary France, her accomplishments as a court painter made her a figure of controversy, with both the liberal press and the yellow journals labeling her an immoral woman, the mistress of various court officials, who attained academy membership with a reception piece painted by one of her lovers. Much of the gossip and slander also centered on her well-attended salon and the extravagance of her entertaining.

Far from being profligate, she was in fact victimized throughout her life by two men who exploited her talent and appropriated her money for their own ends. The first was her miserly stepfather, and the second was her husband, whose gambling debts were a financial drain on her until his death in 1813. Yet she never allowed these problems to interfere with her work. In the more than eight hundred paintings she produced, optimism prevailed. Her work—and the pleasure she took in it—was the driving force of her life.

Bibliography

Baillio, Joseph. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: 1755-1842. Fort Worth, Tex.: Kimbell Art Museum, 1982. A catalog of the first twentieth century exhibition of Vigée-Lebrun’s work. Contains a brief but informative account of her career, a listing of works exhibited in Paris during her lifetime, and complete notes and documentation of the paintings shown in this exhibition, which were selected from museums and private collections there and throughout Europe.

Goodden, Angelica. The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. London: Andre Deutsch, 1997. Comprehensive, objective biography, based upon extensive research of primary sources. Goodden acknowledges critics who claim Vigée-Lebrun’s art is complaisant, but explains how this complacency derived from the the economic and aesthetic constraints under which Vigée-Lebrun worked.

Harris, Ann Sutherland, and Linda Nochlin. Women Artists, 1550-1950. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976. The catalog of one of the first exhibitions devoted entirely to women artists. It includes a perceptive discussion of Vigée-Lebrun’s career and the development of her style as seen in several works in the exhibition. Also, an enlightening account of restrictions endured by women artists, in their training, in relationships with the academies, and in conditions imposed by society.

Petersen, Karen, and J. Wilson. Women Artists. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. An appraisal of works by women artists from the Middle Ages to the present. Contains a discussion of Vigée-Lebrun’s work, placing it in the context of the eighteenth century.

Sheriff, Mary D. The Exceptional Woman: Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Examines the contradictory role of women artists in eighteenth century French society, describing how Vigée-Lebrun was simultaneously flattered and vilified because of the cultural and social attitudes of her time.

Vigée-Lebrun, Élisabeth. The Memoirs of Mme Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun, 1775-1789. Translated by Gerald Shelley. New York: George H. Doran, 1927. An abridged translation of her memoirs, published originally in 1835-1837. This volume, more widely available than the earlier translation (see below), also includes her previously untranslated notes and portraits of many of the leading figures in the arts and politics of her day, all of whom were personal friends or acquaintances of the artist.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Memoirs of Madame Vigée Lebrun. Translated by Lionel Strachey. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903. A less-abridged English translation of Vigée-Lebrun’s memoirs. Provides a fascinating account of European society at the time.