Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France Amassing a Fortune
Exhibition Location: Special Exhibition Gallery, first floor, Gallery 199; February 15 – May 15, 2016
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) is one of the finest 18th-century French painters and among the most important of all women artists. An autodidact with exceptional skills as a portraitist, she achieved success in France and abroad during one of the most eventful, turbulent periods in European history. Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France is the first retrospective and only the second exhibition devoted to this artist in modern times. The 80 works on view at the Metropolitan Museum will be paintings and a few pastels from European and American public and private collections.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais, and the National Gallery of Canada, with the exceptional participation of the Château de Versailles.
Vigée Le Brun’s Paris Years
Born in Paris during the reign of Louis XV, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was the daughter of a professional pastel portraitist who died when she was 12 years old. Precocious and largely self-taught, in her teens Mademoiselle Vigée, chaperoned by her mother, was already working independently as a portraitist and contributing to the support of her family. It became necessary for her to join the artisanal guild in 1774, and she exhibited publicly for the first time when she was 19 at the Salon of the Académie de Saint-Luc.
In 1776 she married the principal art dealer and expert in 18th-century Paris, Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun, with whom she had a daughter, Julie. Theirs was largely a marriage of convenience, beneficial to both, although his profession at first kept her from being accepted into the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. At 23, Vigée Le Brun was summoned to Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), who was a few months younger than she. The earliest of three full-length life-size portraits of the queen in the exhibition will be Marie Antoinette in Court Dress (1778, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which was delivered to her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, in 1779. The most important painting of the queen, commissioned as a propaganda piece for the monarchy and shown at the Salon of 1787, is Marie Antoinette and Her Children (Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon), in which she is presented as a regal mother with the dauphin and his two siblings.
Pages: 1 · 2
More Articles
- Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana: A Tale of Two Women Painters
- Life, Love & Marriage Chests in Renaissance Italy at the Frist* Museum
- Drawn to Purpose Online Exhibition: Women Illustrators and Cartoonists at the Library of Congress
- Abstract Painter Alma Thomas Work Resonates With Vibrant Color, Dense Paint and Energetic Pattern
- What is a Gender Mainstreaming Pilot District? Transforming Housing and Neighborhood Design
- First on the List: Cubbing
- Sargent's Watercolors: A Study in Sunlight
- Aging America: The Cities That Are Graying The Fastest
- Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Royalty on Paper
- Culture Watch: J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy and Larson's In the Garden of Beasts