Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Fortune and Felicity: Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun

Self-Portrait, 1790
Galleria degli Uffizi, Corridorio Vasariano, Florence

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very heaven.”    
     -- from William Wordsworth’s 1805 poem 
“The French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement”.

The women in Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun's portraits have an inner life; you can see it in their eyes; you can feel it in their smiles. They were the exact contemporaries of the heroines in Jane Austen’s novels, and the characters in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Vigee Lebrun painted some of Tolstoy’s ancestors, whose memoirs he consulted while writing his book. 


Varvara Ivanova Ladomirskaya, 1800
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

The women in Vigee Lebrun's paintings were reading the newly published poems of Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, Pushkin and Byron and the novels of Walter Scott; and listening to the latest music by Mozart, Gluck, and Beethoven. Little clues hidden in the paintings hint at their favorite artists.


Baronne de Crussol Florensac, 1785
Musee des Augustins, Toulouse
She is reading the score of Gluck's opera "Echo et Narcisse".

Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun (1755-1824) was part of an outpouring of creativity at the end of the eighteenth century.


Self-Portrait with Cerise Ribbons, circa 1782
Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth, Texas

Now on view in a wonderful, long-awaited show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/vigee-le-brun, her portraits bring to life some of the people who lived through extraordinary times, and give us a glimpse of that dawn when it was bliss to be alive.

Self-portrait with her daughter Julie, 1789
Musee du Louvre, Paris

"In this new world, heart was to be preferred to head; emotion to reason; nature to culture; spontaneity to calculation; simplicity to the ornate; innocence to experience; soul to intellect; the domestic to the fashionable. The key word was sensibilite'  -- the intuitive capacity for intense feeling."
-- from Simon Schama: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.


The Duchesse de Polignac in a Straw Hat, 1782
Musee National des Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon

According to the rules of the Academy, women artists were only allowed to paint portraits or flowers. So she painted portraits. 


Charles Alexandre de Calonne, 1784
Royal Collection Trust, H.M. Queen Elizabeth, London
Most of the men preferred to be painted more formally, with all their medals, ribbons, sashes, and swords. She also painted a few dreamy-eyed Byronic young men – including Lord Byron himself. But mostly Vigee Le Brun painted women, who trusted her and enjoyed the long sittings; many became her friends. 


Portrait of a Young Woman, circa 1797
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
She encouraged them to let down their hair and wash off their powder and rouge; to free their bodies from corsets and stays. She dressed them in lighter, looser, more comfortable Grecian tunics and soft, flowing shawls, with their curly hair blowing in the wind.

Princess Sapiena, nee Potocka,
or Dancing with Shawl, 1794
Royal Castle, Warsaw

She painted them smiling, blushing, walking in nature, embracing their children. She showed them reading books, reading music, writing letters, writing poems, writing songs, wrapped up in a dream.

Madame de Stael as Corinne at Cape Miseno, 1807-9
Musee d"art et Histoire de la Ville de Geneve
Gift of Madame Necker - de Saussure
A lucky chance brought her to the attention of Marie Antoinette, and she became the young queen’s favorite painter.

Marie Antoinette with a Rose, 1783
Collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick
Many of the clothes in the portraits were designed or inspired by the queen's dressmaker, Rose Bertin, who "encouraged Marie-Antoinette to abandon the stiffness (both material and figurative) of formal court dress for the loose, simple gowns of white lawn, cotton, and muslin that she came to favor," as Schama wrote in Citizens.


Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress,  1783
Hessische Hausstiftung, Kronberg
To the contemporary eye, these costumes seem incredibly fancy, but for the era, it was a new and natural look – like today’s movie stars wearing yoga clothes on the street, instead of always posing in full make-up and evening gowns.

The Comtesse Du Barry in a Straw Hat, circa 1781
Private Collection

Vigee Le Brun’s dinner parties brought together her aristocratic patrons and her artist friends, musicians, and theater people – just as in the 60’s the jet set socialized with artists and rock stars. 

Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante, 1790
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool

Many of her patrons felt stifled by court life and prized in her portraits a dream of a freer, more romantic, more sensual life – a breath of fresh air, as Marie Antoinette sought at her make-believe farm where she could pretend to be an ordinary person, as described so poignantly in Antonia Fraser’s Marie Anoinette: The JourneyMost of them did not survive the Revolution.


Self-Portrait in Traveling Costume, 1789-90
Private Collection

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...."
     -- from Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

Vigee Le Brun’s art made her a fortune and saved her life. She fled France after the fall of the Bastille and spent many years travelling to Vienna, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, London, Madrid, supporting herself by painting portraits. 

Julie Le Brun as Flora, 1799
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida
 She survived during the years when many of her friends and patrons came to violent deaths – the Terror, the endless wars, Napoleon, the beginning of modernity. She literally kept her head while those around her were losing theirs. 

Comtesse de la Chatre, 1789
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
She carried her romantic, neoclassical ideals with her during her long years of exile and continued to paint the world as she saw it – wide-eyed, curly-haired, and smiling. 


The Princess von und zu Liechtenstein as Iris 
1793, Private Collection
She believed she possessed "an inborn passion for the art," she wrote in her Memoirs at the end of her long, eventful life. "It is, indeed, to this divine passion that I owe,  not only my fortune, but my felicity."

Self-portrait with Straw Hat, 1784
National Gallery, London


by Rebecca Nemser, March 2, 2016

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/vigee-le-brun














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