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Marie Antoinette and Her Children
Marie Antoinette and Her Children. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun · Public domain · source

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Public domain1755-1842·French·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Paris on 16 April 1755 and died there on 30 March 1842. A portrait painter, she made about 660 portraits and 200 landscapes. She left Paris on the night of 5 October 1789 and spent twelve years working in Italy, Vienna, Russia and Germany before returning to France in 1802; her Souvenirs appeared in three volumes in 1835-37.

Why they matter

She painted more than 30 portraits of Marie Antoinette and her family and became the queen's portraitist, and on 31 May 1783 she was admitted to the Academie royale by royal order, one of very few women it ever took. Her portraits are warm, flattering and alive in a way official portraiture rarely was: her 1783 portrait of the queen in a plain muslin dress caused a scandal and was hastily repainted in formal clothes. Her own self-portraits, smiling, working, looking straight out, made the painter as famous as her sitters.

What to buy

Prints: buy from the museums. The National Gallery in London sells a print of Self Portrait in a Straw Hat from its own painting, and the Met prints Madame Grand to order from its photography; her soft flesh tones and silks need that quality more than most. Books: the catalogue of the 2016 retrospective by Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer and Paul Lang, published by the Met for its exhibition (it went on to the National Gallery of Canada), is the book to get in English. Her Souvenirs, in translation, are her own account of the court and the exile. Originals: not realistic for most buyers. Her paintings are museum and major-auction pieces, and she painted versions of her own successes: the National Gallery's Straw Hat is itself a signed copy she made of her 1782 self-portrait, which belongs to the baronne Edmond de Rothschild. "A version by the artist" is not the prime picture.

Notes

Madame Grand, shown at the Salon of 1783, is at the Met; Marie Antoinette and Her Children has been at Versailles since Louis Philippe's reign; the Self-Portrait with Julie is in the Louvre. The Straw Hat is modelled on Rubens's portrait long mistitled Le Chapeau de Paille; in her copy she changed her dress from lilac to rose pink.

Story

The Salon of 1787 held two paintings by Vigee Le Brun about motherhood, and both caused trouble. The first was a royal commission, Marie Antoinette and Her Children, meant to repair the queen's image after the Diamond Necklace scandal of 1785 by showing her as a mother. The painter did not want to exhibit it: the queen was so unpopular that she feared the picture would be damaged. The administration insisted. The queen's youngest child, Sophie, died shortly before it was finished, and Vigee Le Brun left the cradle beside the queen empty.

The second was her own Self-Portrait with Julie, mother and daughter embracing, and in it she smiles with her lips parted and her teeth showing. The newsletter Memoires secrets called it "an affectation which artists, art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning": that in smiling she showed her teeth. The historian Colin Jones explains the outrage: in painting, an open mouth had meant the lower orders, lost self-control or bad teeth, and polite portraits kept their lips closed.

Two years later, at midnight on 5 October 1789, the queen's painter fled Paris, and did not come back for twelve years. The smiling mother now hangs in the Louvre, and the queen with the empty cradle at Versailles.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

The Met (Madame Grand, 1783) ↗National Gallery, London (Self Portrait in a Straw Hat) ↗The Met ↗Rijksmuseum ↗National Gallery, London ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

National Gallery Shop (Self Portrait in a Straw Hat print) ↗Met Custom Prints (Madame Grand) ↗eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

AbeBooks (Vigee Le Brun, Met catalogue, 2016) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

See also

Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki 1726-1801Giovanni Battista Piranesi 1720-1778Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1780-1867Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825Canaletto 1697-1768Thomas Gainsborough 1727-1788Jean-Antoine Watteau 1684-1721Joshua Reynolds 1723-1792

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