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Self Portrait
Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun
was born on April 16, 1755 in Paris, the daughter of a painter,
from whom she received her first instruction, though she benefited
more by the advice of Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste
Greuze, Joseph Vernet and other masters of the period. By the
time she was in her early teens, she was already painting portraits
professionally. After her studio was seized for practicing without
a license, she applied to the Académie de Saint Luc who
willingly exhibited her works in their Salon. On 25 October
1774, she was made a member of the Académie.
In 1776, she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, a painter
and art dealer. She painted portraits of many of the nobility
of the day and as her career blossomed, she was invited to the
Palace of Versailles to paint Queen Marie-Antoinette. So pleased
was the Queen that over the next several years, Vigée-Lebrun
was commissioned to do numerous portraits of the Queen, her
children, and other members of the Royal family and household.
In 1781 she and her husband toured Flanders and the Netherlands
where the works of the Flemish masters inspired her to try new
techniques. There, she painted portraits of some of the nobility,
including the Prince of Nassau.
On May 31, 1783, Vigée-Lebrun was accepted as a member
of France's Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture
as a painter of historical allegory. Adelaide Labille-Guiard
was also admitted on the same day. The admission of Vigée-Lebrun
was opposed by the men in charge on the grounds that her husband
was an art dealer, but eventually they were overruled by an
order from Louis XVI after Marie-Antoinette put considerable
pressure on her husband on behalf of her painter. The admission
of more than one woman on the same day encouraged comparisons
between the women instead of between one woman and the men members.
After the arrest of the royal family during the French Revolution
Vigée-Lebrun fled France and lived and worked for some
years in Italy, Austria, and Russia, where her experience in
dealing with an aristocratic clientele was still useful. In
Rome, her paintings met with great critical acclaim and she
was elected to the Roman Accademia di San Luca. In Russia, she
was received by the nobility and painted numerous members of
Catherine the Great's family. While there, Vigée-Lebrun
was made a member of the Academy of Fine Arts of St. Petersburg.
She was welcomed back to France during the reign of Emperor
Napoleon I. Much in demand by the elite of Europe, she visited
England at the beginning of the 19th century and painted the
portrait of several British notables including Lord Byron. In
1807 she traveled to Switzerland and was made an honorary member
of the Societe pour l'Avancement des Beaux-Arts of Geneva.
She published her memoirs in 1835 and 1837, which provide an
interesting view of the training of artists at the end of the
period dominated by royal academies.
Still very active with her painting, in her fifties, she purchased
a house in Louveciennes, Île-de-France, and lived there
until the house was seized by the Prussian Army during the war
in 1814. She stayed in Paris until her death on March 30, 1842
when her body was taken back to Louveciennes and buried in the
cemetery near her old home.
Her tombstone epitaph states "Ici, enfin, je repose…"
(Here, at last, I rest…).
Vigée-Lebrun is considered the most important female
artist of the 18th century. She left behind 660 portraits and
200 landscapes. In addition to private collections, her works
can be found at major museums in Europe and the United States.
Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously
successful painter, a favorite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette,
and one of the few women accepted into the Royal Academy of
Painting and Sculpture. In accounts of her role as an artist,
she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified
as monstrously unfeminine. In The Exceptional Woman,
Mary D. Sheriff uses Vigée-Lebrun's career to explore
the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the
moral, philosophical, professional, and medical debates about
women in eighteenth-century France. Paying particular attention
to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigée-Lebrun's
images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman"
and the strictures imposed on women.
Engaging ancient-régime philosophy, as well as modern
feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism,
Sheriff's interpretations of Vigée-Lebrun's paintings
challenge us to rethink the work and the world of this controversial
woman artist.
Memoirs of Madame Vigée Lebrun by Lionel Strachey (Translator),
John Russell – Hardcover: 233 pages Publisher: George Braziller
(March 1989)
This spellbinding first-person narrative, a reissue of the 1903
edition, has all the elements of a successful novel: its charismatic
heroine (1756-1842) is an eminent and exceptionally productive
portrait painter on intimate terms with the French royal family
at the dawn of the Revolution; leaving behind a ne'er-do-well
husband (whom she had romantically and foolishly married in
secret) as well as a coterie of artists, she flees the Terror
and supports her daughter and herself by painting the nobility
in the capitals of Europe. Vigée Lebrun's painterly talent
for observation results in an irresistible (and nearly always
admiring) account of historic figures at an epochal moment.
A gifted gossip, she does not stint on anecdotes ("Louis
XVIII sang more out of tune than anyone in the whole world.
'How do you think I sing?' he asked me one day. 'Like a prince,
Your Highness' "). Although few will share her politics--"The
common people of Russia are in general ugly, but . . . they
are the best creatures in the world . . . they often reminded
me of what someone said about the beginning of the Revolution:
'If their bonds are taken off they will be much more unhappy!'
"— fewer still will want to put this book down. Illustrations
not seen by PW. —Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information,
Inc.
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The
Exceptional Woman: Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and
the Cultural Politics of Art
Élisabeth
Louise Vigée Le Brun, 1755-1842
Biographie de Madame Vigée-Lebrun
The
Sweetness of Life - A Biography of Élisabeth Louise Vigée
Le Brun
by Angelica Goodden – Hardcover: 384 pages 
Memoirs of Madame Vigée Lebrun
