Age of Revolution
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842)
Rococo and the French Eighteenth Century painter.
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, born in Paris in 1755, was the most sought-after portraitist of the late Ancien Régime and the favourite painter of Queen Marie Antoinette. Largely self-taught after early lessons from her father, a pastellist, she was painting fashionable sitters as a teenager and was admitted to the Académie Royale in 1783, on the same day as her rival Adélaïde Labille-Guiard — an exception granted despite the rule limiting women members. Her portraits married Rococo grace and luminous flesh to a new naturalness of pose and expression: sitters smile, lean, and embrace their children.
Her closeness to the Queen, whom she painted more than twenty times, made her a target when the Revolution came. On the night the royal family was brought to Paris in October 1789 she fled France with her young daughter Julie, beginning a twelve-year exile that became a triumphal European tour — Rome, Naples, Vienna, and six years at the imperial court in Saint Petersburg — everywhere in demand among the courts and aristocracies still standing. She was struck from the list of émigrés and returned to France in 1802, continuing to paint and, late in life, writing her memoirs.
Those Souvenirs, published in the 1830s, are among the liveliest artist's memoirs ever written, full of Marie Antoinette, revolution, exile, and the manners of a vanished Europe. Vigée Le Brun left some six hundred portraits and died in Paris in 1842, the last great witness of the courtly world she had painted.
The words the record keeps using: graceful, charming, luminous, natural, warm, elegant, spirited, flattering.
At a glance
- Lived 1755–1842
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Rococo and the French Eighteenth Century, Neoclassicism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Oil glazing, Alla prima (wet-in-wet)
Works in the archive
- Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782 (National Gallery, London)
Inspired by Rubens's 'Chapeau de Paille,' which she had just admired in Antwerp, Vigée Le Brun paints herself outdoors in a beribboned straw hat and simple dress, palette in hand, meeting the sun and the viewer with an… - Marie Antoinette with a Rose (à la Rose), 1783 (Palace of Versailles)
Vigée Le Brun painted this dignified portrait of the Queen holding a rose after an earlier likeness in a simple muslin gown had scandalized the 1783 Salon for showing the Queen 'in her chemise.' Here Marie Antoinette… - Marie Antoinette and Her Children, 1787 (Palace of Versailles)
A grand, deliberately public portrait commissioned to repair the Queen's reputation, showing Marie Antoinette as a devoted mother surrounded by her children — the dauphin pointing to an empty cradle for a lost infant.… - Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie, 1789 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
The painter holds her small daughter Julie, who wraps both arms around her mother's neck in an image of pure maternal tenderness. Painted on the eve of the Revolution, it is one of the best-loved of all her works and… - Self-Portrait (at the Easel, Painting the Queen), 1790 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)
Painted in exile at the request of the Uffizi, which sought her self-portrait for its famous collection of artists' likenesses, she shows herself at the easel in a black dress and white lace-trimmed cap, sketching a…
What was said
I opened my paint-box so excitedly that I spilled my brushes on the floor. I stooped down to pick them up. "Never mind, never mind," said the Queen, and, for aught I could say, she insisted on gathering them all up herself.
It may be well imagined that I preferred to paint her in a plain gown and especially without a wide hoopskirt.
on the eve of my departure from France, when I was to escape from the horrors I foresaw
What would Élisabeth make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Élisabeth · Keep a life moment the way Élisabeth would · Pictures made after Élisabeth