Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun is mostly known as the official painter of Queen Marie Antoinette.
Born on April 16, 1755, in Paris on Rue Coquillière, her father, Louis Vigèe, was an artist who began teaching her to paint at a very young age. Elisabeth was just twelve years old when her father died after swallowing a fish bone. Her mother, Jeanne, remarried quickly to jeweler Jacques-François Le Sèvre, moving the family to Rue Saint-Honoré. Elisabeth wasn’t fond of her new stepfather and missed her father dearly.
After her father's death, she began to train under Gabriel Briard, who had an atelier in the Louvre. During the day, she would train and be surrounded by the Dutch masters. Women had many restrictions at the time, and the only way to work with other artists, male or female, as a copy mix and mingle was within the walls of the Louvre.
In 1770, at just 15 years old, she finished her first portrait of her mother. Wanting to extend her education, she enrolled in the Academy of Saint-Luc, one of the only schools that took women students. In no time, her portraits became very popular and were sought out by the upper class of Paris at just 17 years old. Her stepfather had other ideas, such as his personal piggy bank, and saw you taking all the money she made.
Another move in 1775 took them to Rue de Cléry and to new neighbor Jean-Baptiste Le Brun, the great-nephew of French painter and man behind Versailles Charles Le Brun. Jean-Baptiste might have already been married in Holland, but that didn’t stop him from asking Elisabeth to marry him. She wasn’t in love with him, but she wanted to get away from her stepfather. On January 11, 1776, they were married in the Église Saint Eustache.
The same year, the Count de Provence, future Louis XVIII, commissioned her for a portrait; it was her entry into the Court of Versailles, and there was no turning back. Marie Antoinette saw her painting and loved her flattering female touch. Painting Marie Antoinette more than thirty times, but it was one portrait that would make her a household name.
At the Salon of 1793, she entered a painting of the queen in a white muslin dress. Seeing the queen in essentially her underwear shocked everyone. Elisabeth was forced to remove the painting and replace it with a new version, this time in a blue-grey satin dress. It has become the most often-used image of the queen since.
It wasn’t the first time she caused a stir in the artistic world. In 1786,elf-portrait hol she painted a sding her daughter Julie. The classic Madonna and Child was an often-seen subject, but this one was a bit different. Elisabeth painted her mouth slightly open and, God forbid, smiling. People were outraged, and today, it is known as one of the very first smiles in Western art.
In 1789, while at the Chateau de Louveciennes with Madame du Barry, the Sans-Culottes arrived and destroyed all her paintings. It was the start of the Revolution, and anyone associated with the crown was threatened with death. With her daughter Julie, born in 1780, they fled France for Italy while her husband remained in Paris. In Florence and Rome, she met other exiled artists and continued to paint.
She could not return to France as her name was on the list of more than 140,000 French citizens wanted for their ties to royalty. Elisabeth and Julie stayed in Italy, at the same time sending paintings back to Paris as they were finished. Back in Paris, her husband was working as an appraiser of the royal collections that were being seized and was also able to keep an eye on his wife's paintings that were being pulled from view and did all he could to have her name removed from the list so she could return.
On January 18, 1801, she was finally allowed to return and traveled with her old friend, the Count de Provence, now Louis XVIII, who was avoiding France and staying in London and Switzerland. Constantly reinventing herself and nibbling between sides 1805, she painted Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat, in Napoleon's good graces, which put her i.
In 1809, she purchased a house outside of Paris in Louveciennes, hosted Salons, and continued to paint. In 1815, Louis XVIII took the throne in Paris and worked to restore the image of his brother Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Louis XVIII allowed Elisabeth’s portraits of the royal family to return to the walls of the Musée du Louvre, Versailles, and Fontainebleau, where they remain to this day.
A long-awaited divorce from her husband came in 1813, and in 1819, her estranged daughter Julie died. As everyone died around her, she wrote her three-volume memoir until she lost her sight due to a brain tumor, which took her life on March 30, 1842, on Rue Saint-Lazare.
Elisabeth's legacy is largely defined by her iconic portraits of Marie Antoinette, a testament to her ability to immortalize historical figures. However, her artistic prowess extended beyond this, as she also created numerous other captivating images, including the portrait of Hubert Robert. Of her 900 paintings, 660 were portraits, each a unique reflection of her subjects, and are now displayed in collections across the globe.
