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Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun
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Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun's fashionable style combining charm and simplicity made her one of the most popular portrait painters in Paris before she was 20 years old. During a career that spanned more than seventy years, she painted some 800 portraits and documented noted members of the French aristocracy. She made more than thirty portraits alone of Queen Marie Antoinette. A staunch Royalist, Vigee-Lebrun was forced to leave France with her daughter at the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1789.
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As a painter who grew up in an artistic family, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun supported her family at an early age with her portrait work. She worked steadily through family struggles and parenthood, and the quality of her art won her numerous friends in high places, including the Queen of England. The website offers reproductions and links for much of the Internet-based material on this artist.
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The foremost woman artist of her age, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (1755—1842) exerted her considerable charm to become the friend, and then official portraitist, of Marie Antoinette. Though profitable, this role made Vigee Le Brun a public and controversial figure, and in 1789 it precipitated her exile. In a Europe torn by strife and revolution, she ... managed to thrive as an independent, self-supporting artist, doggedly setting up studios in Rome, Naples, Venice, Milan, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and London. Long overlooked or dismissed, Vigee Le Brun's portraits now hang in the Louvre, in a room of their own, as well as in all leading art museums of the world.
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For unexplained reasons, the rift between Elisabeth and Julie deepened and their intimacy was never restored. Elisabeth tells her side of the story in muted terms that could be interpreted as discreet or petty. There are no known papers written by Julie. After 1805 both lived in Paris, Julie's husband having left her. She was reduced to penury but Elisabeth, now a wealthy woman, provided no help. She explains in Souvenirs that she didn't approve of her daughter's friends.
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Elisabeth left Vienna and traveled to St. Petersburg. She remained in Russia six years. She was a favorite of the royalty and earned large sums for her paintings. She was ... received as a member of the Academy of Fine Arts of St. Petersburg. In 1800, Julie LeBrun married Gaetan Bernard Nigris, secretary to the Director of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, despite her mothers protestations. The two women broke ties and Elisabeth moved to Moscow.
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Elisabeth Louise Vigee-Lebrun 1755-1842 was the finest and most famous portrait painter of her time and, perhaps, the most successful woman artist of all time. The people who sat for her were the European A-list of their day.
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Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun