Remember this painting?

The work of the French 18th-century painter, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), is being featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York right now. Amazingly, this is the first retrospective and only the second exhibition devoted to Vigée Le Brun in modern times. The 80 works on view include oil paintings and a few pastels from European and American public and private collections.

The Met’s website has great images and good information about the artist and the exhibition here http://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/vigee-le-brun

The images and information in this post is taken largely from the Met’s website.

One of the finest 18th-century French painters and among the most important of all women artists, Vigée Le Brun is a beacon of inspiration to all women. She was remarkable not only for her technical gifts but for her understanding of and sympathy with her sitters.

With her exceptional skills as a portraitist, she achieved success in France and Europe during one of the most eventful, turbulent periods in European history and indeed the path of her own life reflects that turbulence.

To wit: At the age of 21, she married the leading art dealer in Paris. Her husband’s profession created a conflict of interest that at first kept her from being accepted into the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Nevertheless, through the intervention of Marie Antoinette, she was admitted at the age of 28 in 1783, becoming one of only four women members.

However, her association with the royalty forced her to flee for her safety from France in 1789; she traveled to Italy, where in 1790 she was elected to membership in the Accademia di San Luca, Rome. She worked independently in Florence, Naples, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Berlin before returning to France, painting portraits of, among others, members of the royal families of Naples, Russia, and Prussia.

Despite the fact that she was in exile, she exhibited at the Paris Salons. That seems pretty amazing to me.

One of the best features of the museum’s website is that you can take an audio tour online of the exhibition here: http://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/vigee-le-brun/audio-guide

Let’s look at a few of the key objets in the exhibition:

Here’s her portrait of her brother, painted when she was 18 and he was 15.

Etienne (1758–1820) is presented as a draftsman holding an artist’s portfolio and porte-crayon. He later developed a reputation as a witty poet and playwright.  The French Revolution marked his life in serious ways as well as that of his sister.

Here’s her portrait of her stepfather, whom she disliked intensely:

The stepfather, Monsieur Le Sèvre (1724–1810), was a gold- and silversmith who brought Vigée’s family to live above his shop on the rue Saint-Honoré. He is shown seated at a desk, reading, in a satin robe and nightcap, typical at-home attire for men of the time. The sympathetic portrayal belies the intense dislike Vigée felt for him. She accused him of hoarding her income.

Her mother, Madame Jacques François Le Sèvre:

The sitter (1728–1800) had married our artist’s father, Louis Vigée (1715–1767), a portraitist and official at the Académie de Saint-Luc.  After his death, she married Jacques Le Sèvre, a goldsmith. Madame Le Sèvre encouraged her adolescent daughter’s professional aspirations by chaperoning her sittings and taking her to see works of art. Vigée’s mother wears a satin cloak trimmed with swans’ down and bows of a color the artist particularly favored.

Her allegorical interpretation of “Poetry.”

Vigée was nineteen when officials sealed her studio on the pretext that she was painting professionally without having joined a guild. She therefore applied and was admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc. Of the works she contributed to her first exhibition, three were allegories of the arts: Painting, Poetry, and Music. Here, Poetry, a draped nude, writes in a portfolio with a goose quill. She looks upward, conveying a moment of inspiration.

Her patron, the queen Marie Antoinette in Court Dress:

In 1777, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria wrote to her daughter Marie Antoinette (1755–1793) asking for a portrait. Vigée Le Brun received the commission, her first from the queen. She remembered that the queen “walked better than any other woman in France, holding her head very high with a majesty that singled her out in the midst of the entire court.”

The Duchesse de Polignac in a Straw Hat

Vigée Le Brun shows the duchess (1749–1793), a close friend of Marie Antoinette, bathed in pale golden light. She wears the straw hat and costume of an elegant courtier-shepherdess.

Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress

The queen and her circle had grown weary of the discomforts of the formal attire worn at Versailles. In the early 1780s, in private settings, they therefore abandoned their corsets and hoops for draped, loosely belted muslin chemise dresses, which were relaxed and natural.

With the support of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, Vigée Le Brun became one of fourteen women (among 550 artists) admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture before the Revolution. At her first Salon, she displayed a number of portraits, including one of the queen in a white muslin dress and straw hat. The characterization of the monarch was admired. However, the pastoral costume was condemned as inappropriate for the public portrayal of royalty and the artist was asked to remove it from the exhibition.

Comtesse de Ségur

VigÈe-Le Brun Elisabeth Louise (1755-1842). Versailles, ch?teaux de Versailles et de Trianon. MV5962.

The countess (1756–1828) shared in the work of her husband, a diplomat, historian, and supporter of the American War of Independence. With her lips parted in a smile, she here abandons the mask of impassivity traditionally embraced by courtiers.

This luminous, subtly painted image is in the new style Vigée Le Brun adopted after she saw Peter Paul Rubens’s Presumed Portrait of Susanne Lunden.

Baronne de Crussol Florensac

The baronne de Crussol Florensac turns to gaze at the viewer over her shoulder. She holds a musical score and wears a splendid red costume with a deep black velvet collar and a matching hat. Little is known of this woman of great beauty, elegance, and distinction. The support, a wood panel, contributes to the lustrous surface of the picture.

Marie Antoinette and Her Children

In 1785, by order of Louis XVI, the office of royal households commissioned this important portrait of Marie Antoinette from Vigée Le Brun, the first woman to attain the rank of painter to the king. Inspired by depictions of the Holy Family, the work was intended to extoll the queen’s maternal role. The empty bassinet alludes to her fourth child, who had recently died.

You can see many more images from the exhibition at the Met’s website linked above.

It’s about time!