When Louise Elisabeth Vigèe was born in Paris, the Marquise de Pompadour (1721-1761) ruled at Versailles and the court, under Louis XV, was enjoying its period of greatest opulence. While she continued to paint elsewhere after the French Revolution, it is through her eyes that we see the gaiety and elegance of the French upper classes before the fall of the Bastille in 1789.
She carved out a career of distinction and in her own field was as pre-eminent as Madame de StaÎl, whom she painted in 1808, was in hers. She herself was among the most beautiful French women of that time, and she was gifted and industrious too. The lines of character did not concern her, nor, for that matter, did they interest most other painters during the time of her supreme success in the 1780's. If there were many portents of coming political disaster, the exquisite women of French society, leading carefree lives with no thought but of pleasure, showed neither worry nor anxiety in their beautiful young faces as Vigèe-Lebrun painted them. She reached the peak of her popularity between 17, just before the outbreak of the Revolution. Of her 877 paintings, at least 662 were portraits. Her twenty to thirty portraits of the Queen, though her most famous, form only a small part of her work.
Vigèe-Lebrun (she spelled it Le Brun) is known especially for her portraits of women and as the favorite portrait painter of Marie Antoinette and her court. The latter comes from a stark line drawing sketched by Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) a few moments before her execution the former from the beautifully painted portraits by Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigèe-Lebrun (1755-1842). Two IMAGES of Marie Antoinette are familiar to us: one of a radiant young woman at the height of her splendor, the other of a proud old hag, hands tied behind her back, seated in a tumbrel on the way to the guillotine. Vigée Le Brun's Gallery | Vigée Le Brun Biographies Vigée Le Brun's Home Page | Index to Art Pages Vigèe-Le Brun And The Women Of The French Court Vigee Le Brun's Portraits of Women Reprinted from ANTIQUES, November 1967, pp.
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