By Paul Dunwell, writing for EasyFrame
© Copyright EasyFrame 2020
What this article is about
This article is about the French painter Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. During a long career, interrupted by the hiccough of the French Revolution, which removed some of the heads she had thankfully already captured on canvas, she painted many of Europe's royals and privileged celebrities.
She was a mould-breaker in her time, and she still is. In 2019 her full-length 'Portrait of Muhammad Dervish Khan' sold at Sotheby's for US.2 million (almost exactly £6 million at the time), then the highest price for a work by a female pre-modern artist. It beat her own previous record, for one of her many self-portraits, five-fold. On that basis she is considered an 'old master'.
Early years, education and inspirations
Élisabeth Louise Vigée was born in Paris. Her mother, Jeanne, was a hairdresser. Her father, Louis, was a portraitist and painter of fans, and he taught her first, at a tender age. At five she was packed off to a convent, which she left only at twelve, when her father died.
Two years later her mother married a wealthy jeweller, whom Élisabeth seems to have despised. As she admitted in her memoirs, he committed the heinous crime of wearing her dead father's clothes without having them altered to fit. It apparently escaped her that his proximity to the royal court, now that she was painting portraits professionally, would put her on the fast track to recognition.
In this period she was tutored and inspired by four capable French artists:
- Gabriel François Doyen, 30 years her senior, painted religious and romantic works. He left for Russia during the Revolution at the invitation of Catherine II.
- Jean-Baptiste Greuze, also 30 years older, painted portraits, historical scenes and more. He stood his ground during the Terror and painted people like Jean-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, who had a hand in sending many of Vigée Le Brun's clients to the guillotine.
- Claude-Joseph Vernet, 40 years older, was a landscape and seascape painter who died at the outbreak of the Revolution.
- Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, whose great-great-uncle had been the first director of the French Academy under Louis XIV. She married him at 21, and they toured the Low Countries together, where both were inspired by Dutch and Flemish work. Her 'Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat' was one result.
Rise to prominence
In 1787 Vigée Le Brun's 'Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie' caused a scandal because she showed herself openly smiling. She actually bared her teeth, at a time when it was considered unseemly to look anything but solemn, and it got into the scandal sheets. A couple of centuries later the feminist Simone de Beauvoir was giving her grief for a different reason: a successful painter had dared to depict herself as a happy wife and mother. You can't please all the people all the time!
The silliness may have helped bring her to the attention of the court. She became a frequent painter of the queen, Marie-Antoinette, wife of the doomed Louis XVI. Her style is described as Rococo (the elaborately ornamental late-baroque style of 18th-century continental Europe) with a touch of Neoclassicism (a revival of ancient Greek and Roman style). She painted at least 30 portraits of her patron, mostly presenting the queen as one of the people, a mother with simple tastes. As we know, the PR exercise didn't convince the masses, who resented her wealth and privilege, and her Austrian birth.
A headstrong mould-breaker
Vigée Le Brun was clearly a headstrong woman. Her studio was shut down in her mid-teens because she had no licence. Undeterred, she went to the Académie de Saint-Luc, a Parisian guild, which exhibited her work without knowing who she was, or very probably that she was a woman. When she was 19 they recognised her talent and made her a member.
At 28 she became a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, something only 15 women achieved in almost 150 years. When the Revolution began in 1789, one of the first things it did was abolish such recognition for women.
When the Terror started, she fled. She sensibly realised that any friend of Marie-Antoinette was likely to be executed, and she had the nerve to leave with her daughter but without her husband. He was a painter and art dealer who gamely said she had gone to Italy to instruct and improve herself, and who lobbied for her safe return 12 years later, though by then they were divorced. She set off on a grand European tour, mostly through Italy, Austria and Russia, and was rightly in great demand.
Self-imposed exile
Many of Vigée Le Brun's friends, sitters and patrons were executed during the Revolution, which ran for a decade from 1789. She was best off elsewhere.
- Italy. She painted several royals, including Marie-Antoinette's sister Maria Carolina of Austria, and Lady Emma Hamilton as the Cumaean Sibyl, the painting of which she was proudest.
- Austria. She painted Princess Maria Josefa Hermengilde von Esterhazy as Ariadne and Princess Karoline von Liechtenstein as Iris, very much in a Roman style.
- Russia. She painted the former King of Poland and half of Catherine the Great's family. She had to add sleeves to some dresses because the empress thought her granddaughters were showing too much flesh. She became a member of the Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Petersburg and stayed 6 years. She was unhappy that her daughter remained there, having married a Russian.
She got back into France only in 1802. The country had been settled for a couple of years, but there was still a public list of counter-revolutionary émigrés, and her ex-husband was instrumental in having her removed from it. Once back she continued to travel, to Britain, where she met people such as Lord Byron, and repeatedly to Switzerland.
Conclusion
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a truly great artist who deservedly made it in a man's world. That is now recognised, and her originals no longer sell cheaply. High-resolution prints are available, though. One excellent source of unframed prints is the National Portrait Gallery at www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw120862/Elisabeth-Louise-Vige-Le-Brun, where they cost as little as £6.
You'll want to frame whatever you buy. Any good framer will show you a range of solutions and advise on what suits the work and where it will hang. EasyFrame is on 01234 856 501 and sales@EasyFrame.co.uk, and they'll always chat even if you don't want to buy!