Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (; ; 16 April 1755 – 30 March 1842), also known as Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun or simply Madame Le Brun, was a French painter who mostly specialized in portrait painting, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Her artistic style is generally considered part of the aftermath of Rococo with elements of an adopted Neoclassical style. Her subject matter and color palette can be classified as Rococo, but her style is aligned with the emergence of Neoclassicism. Vigée Le Brun created a name for herself in Ancien Régime society by serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette. She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers, and was elected to art academies in ten cities. Some famous contemporary artists, such as Joshua Reynolds, viewed her as one of the greatest portraitists of her time, comparing her with Flemish (notably Rubens) and the old Dutch masters.
Vigée Le Brun created 660 portraits and 200 landscapes. In addition to many works in private collections, her paintings are owned by major museums, such as the Louvre in Paris, Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, National Gallery in London, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and many other collections in Europe and the United States. Her personal habitus was characterized by a high sensitivity to sound, sight and smell. Between 1835 and 1837, when Vigée Le Brun was in her eighties, with the help of her nieces Caroline Rivière and , she published her memoirs in three volumes (Souvenirs), some of which are in epistolary format. They also contain many pen portraits as well as advice for young portraitists.
Biography
Early life
Born in Paris on 16 April 1755, Élisabeth Louise Vigée was the daughter of Jeanne (; 1728–1800), a hairdresser from a peasant background, and Louis Vigée (1715–1767), a portraitist, pastellist and member of the Académie de Saint-Luc, who mostly specialized in painting with oils. Élisabeth exhibited artistic inclinations from her childhood, making a sketch of a bearded man at the age of seven or eight; when he first saw her sketches her father was jubilant and exclaimed that "You will be a painter my child, if there ever was one", and started to give her lessons in art. In 1760, at the age of five, she had entered a convent, where she remained until 1766. She then worked as an assistant to her father's friend, the painter and poet Pierre Davesne, with whom she learned more about painting. Her father died when she was 12 years old, from infections after several surgical operations. In 1768, her mother married a wealthy but mean jeweller, Jacques-François Le Sèvre, and shortly after, the family moved to the Rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Palais Royal.
In her memoir, Vigée Le Brun directly stated her feelings about her stepfather: "I hated this man; even more so since he made use of my father's personal possessions. He wore his clothes, just as they were, without altering them to fit his figure." During this period, Élisabeth benefited from the advice of Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Joseph Vernet. Greuze's influence is evident in her portrait of her younger brother, playwright and poet Étienne Vigée.
After her father's death, her mother sought to raise her spirits by taking her to the Palais de Luxembourg's art gallery; seeing the works of Peter Paul Rubens and other old masters left a great impression on her. She also visited numerous private galleries, including those of Rendon de Boisset, the Duc de Praslin [fr], and the Marquis de Levis; the artist took notes and copied the works of old masters such as Van Dyck, Rubens and Rembrandt to improve her art. At an early age, she reversed the order of her given Christian names, and was known among her inner circle as 'Louise'. For most of her life, she signed her paintings, documents and letters as "Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun", although she acknowledged later in life that the correct baptismal order would be Élisabeth Louise.
By the time she was in her early teens, Élisabeth was painting portraits professionally. She greatly disliked the contemporary High Rococo fashion, and often solicited her sitters to allow her to alter their apparel. Inspired by Raphael and Domenichino, she often draped her subjects in shawls and long scarves; these styles would later become ubiquitous in her portraiture. After her studio was seized for her practicing without a license, she applied to the Académie de Saint-Luc, which unwittingly exhibited her works in its Salon. In 1774, she was made a member of the Académie. Her studio's reputation saw a meteoric rise, and her renown spread outside France. By 1774, she had painted portraits which included those of the Comte Orloff, Comte Pierre Chouvaloff [ru] (one of Empress Elizabeth's favorites), the Comtesse de Brionne [fr], the Duchess of Orléans (future mother of King Louis Philippe), the Marquis de Choiseul, and the Chancellor de Aguesseau, among many others. In 1776, she received her first royal commission, to paint the portrait of the Comte de Provence (the future King Louis XVIII).
After her stepfather retired from his business, he moved his family to the Hôtel de Lubert in Paris where she met Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a painter, art dealer and relation of the painter Charles Le Brun, on the Rue de Cléry where they lodged. Élisabeth visited M. Le Brun's apartments frequently to view his private collection of paintings, which included examples from many different schools. He agreed to her request to borrow some of the paintings in order to copy them and improve her skills, which she saw as one of the greatest boons of artistic instruction she had received. After residing in the Hôtel de Lubert for six months, M. Le Brun asked for the artist's hand in marriage. Élisabeth was in a dilemma as to whether to agree or refuse the offer; she had a steady source of income from her rising career as an artist and her future was secure; as such, she wrote, she had never contemplated marriage. On her mother's urging and goaded by her desire to be separated from her stepfather's worsening temperament, Élisabeth agreed, though her doubts were such that she was still hesitant on her wedding day on 11 January 1776; she was twenty years old. The wedding took place in great privacy in the Saint-Eustache church, with only two banns being read, and was kept secret for some time at the request of her husband, who was officially engaged to another woman at the time in an attempt to secure a lucrative art deal with a Dutch art dealer. Élisabeth acceded to his request as she was reluctant to give up her now famous maiden name. In 1778, she and her husband contracted to purchase the Hôtel de Lubert. In this same year, she became the official painter to the Queen.
During the two weeks after the wedding had taken place in secret, the artist was visited by a stream of people giving her ominous news regarding her husband, these people believing that she had still not agreed to his proposal. These visitors started with the court jeweller, followed by the Duchesse de Arenberg and Mme de Souza, the Portuguese ambassadress, who passed stories of M. Le Brun's habits as a spendthrift and womanizer. Élisabeth would later regret this match as she found these rumors to be true, though she wrote that in spite of his faults he was still an agreeable and obliging man with a sweet nature. However, she frequently condemned his gambling and adulterous habits in her memoirs, as these left her in a financially critical position at the time of her flight from France. Her relationship with him deteriorated later so much that she demanded the refund of her dowry from M. Le Brun in 1802. Vigée Le Brun began exhibiting her work at their home, and the salons she held there supplied her with many new and important contacts.
Her husband's great-great-uncle was Charles Le Brun, the first director of the French Academy under Louis XIV. Her husband appropriated most of her income and pressed her to also take on the role of a private tutor to increase his income from her. The artist found tutoring to be frustrating due to her inability to assert authority over her pupils, most of whom were older than her, and found the distraction from her work irritating; she renounced tutoring soon after she had begun.
After two years of marriage, Vigée Le Brun became pregnant, and on 12 February 1780, she gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne Lucie Louise, whom she called Julie and nicknamed "Brunette". In 1784, she gave birth to a second child who died in infancy.
In 1781, she and her husband toured Flanders, Brussels and the Netherlands, where seeing the works of the Flemish masters inspired her to try new techniques. Her Self-portrait in a Straw Hat (1782) was a "free imitation" of Rubens's Le Chapeau de Paille. Dutch and Flemish influences have also been noted in The Comte d'Espagnac (1786) and Portrait of Madame Perregaux (1789).
In yet another of the series of scandals that marked her early career, her 1784 Portrait of Charles Alexandre de Calonne depicting Louis XVI's minister of finance, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, was the target of a public scandal after it was exhibited in the Salon of 1785. Rumors circulated that the minister had paid the artist a very large sum of money, while other rumors circulated that she had had an affair with de Calonne. The famous Paris Opera soprano Sophie Arnould commented on the portrait "Madame Le Brun had cut off his legs so he could not escape". More rumors and scandals followed soon after as, to the painter's dismay, M. Le Brun began building a mansion on the Rue de-Gros-Chenet, with the public claiming that de Calonne was financing the new home – although her husband did not finish constructing the house until 1801, shortly before her return to France after her long exile. She was also rumored to have had another affair, with Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil, who was one of her most devoted patrons. Their correspondence published later strongly affirmed the status of this affair. These rumors spiraled into an extensive defamation campaign targeting the painter throughout 1785.
In 1787, she caused a minor public scandal when her Self-portrait with her Daughter Julie was exhibited at that year's Salon showing her smiling and open-mouthed, which was in direct contravention of traditional painting conventions going back to antiquity. The court gossip-sheet Mémoires secrets commented: "An affectation which artists, art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning, and which finds no precedent among the Ancients, is that in smiling, [Madame Vigée LeBrun] shows her teeth." In light of this and her other Self-portrait with her Daughter Julie (1789), Simone de Beauvoir dismissed Vigée Le Brun as narcissistic in The Second Sex (1949): "Madame Vigée-Lebrun never wearied of putting her smiling maternity on her canvases."
In 1788, Vigée Le Brun was impressed with the faces of the Mysorean ambassadors of Tipu-Sultan, and solicited their approval to take their portraits. The ambassador responded by saying he would only agree if the request came from the King, which Vigée Le Brun procured, and she proceeded to paint the portrait of Dervish Khan, followed by a group portrait of the ambassador and his son.
Marie Antoinette