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Élisabeth Louise
Vigée Le Brun – French 1755-1842
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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.
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(also
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Search for all Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun items at AMAZON.
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  Élisabeth
Vigée Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution by Gita May – Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher:
Yale University Press (October 6, 2005)
In a biography as entrancing as its impressive subject, May
chronicles the life story of a French woman artist who overcame
the entrenched misogyny and bloody upheavals of her time to
become the portraitist of choice for Europe's most powerful
rulers. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) was
blessed not only with talent but also with beauty, poise, and
pragmatism. Already earning a good living with her luminous
portraits--she was particularly adept at capturing the radiance
of women and girls—Vigée Le Brun was reluctant
to marry, and sure enough, her husband squandered her fortune.
Vigée Le Brun was forced to flee Paris after the French
Revolution, but she turned exile into a grand tour of Italy,
Germany, Austria, Russia, and England as she was warmly welcomed
everywhere she went and given plum commissions. Fearless, inquisitive,
and clear-eyed, Vigée Le Brun climbed Mount Vesuvius,
painted Catherine the Great, and hid her diamonds in her stockings,
eventually returning to France in triumph. Like her irresistible
subject, May is a superb portraitist, rendering with a rich
palette and a light touch the exhilarating life of a remarkable
artist and human being. —Donna Seaman Copyright ©
American Library Association. All rights reserved
 The
Exceptional Woman: Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and
the Cultural Politics of Art by Mary D. Sheriff –
Paperback: 368 pages Publisher: University of Chicago Press;
Reprint edition (October 24, 1997)
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.
  Élisabeth
Louise Vigée Le Brun, 1755-1842 by Joseph Baillio
– Paperback: 143 pages Publisher: Kimbell Art Museum (1982)
Biographie de Madame Vigée-Lebrun
by F. Pitt-Rivers – Paperback Publisher: Gallimard (April
25, 2001) |
 The
Sweetness of Life - A Biography of Élisabeth Louise Vigée
Le Brun
by Angelica Goodden – Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Andre Deutsch (October 1, 1998)
A scholarly, illuminating biography of one of the 18th century's
most successful female portraitists. Although her paintings
appear in museums the world over, critics and historians have
often given Vigée Le Brun short shrift, faulting her
for the complaisant quality of her art. Here Goodden, a fellow
in French at Oxford University, duly notes this tendency but
also makes plain the aesthetic and economic constraints within
which the artist had to work. For although she was the daughter
of a minor portrait painter and precociously talented as a child,
Vigée Le Brun was denied any formal art training on the
basis of her sex. ``Such institutional prejudice mattered insamuch
as life drawing was the basis of historical painting, the highest
genre in the pictorial hierarchy, and one to which ambitious
women aspired,'' notes Goodden. And so, from the time she first
set up her own studiowhen she was just an adolescentVigée
Le Brun became a painter of portraits, primarily those of French
royalty, power brokers, courtiers, and courtesans. For better
or worse, she also gained unparalleled access to the royal court
and became the chosen portraitist of Marie-Antoinette. Fortunately,
her close affiliation with the queen did not doom her to suffer
the same grisly fate; she fled Paris in disguise even as the
royal family was being forcibly removed from Versailles. Although
Le Brun continued to earn a handsome living from the royal migrs
who scattered throughout Europe in the wake of the French Revolution,
the world she had known disintegrated, and with it her hopes
of becoming a painter of history. What she did, though, she
did exceptionally well and earned her place as one of only a
handful of women admitted to the Acadmie Royale in Paris. Without
overemphasizing the rarity of her subject, Goodden balances
Vigée Le Brun's personal adventurousness and her political
conservatism with cool objectivity. (8 pages color, 16 pages
b&w illustrations) —Copyright ©1998, Kirkus
Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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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