VIGÉE-LEBRUN, Élisabeth

Crowned with a wreath of grapes and vines, this smiling woman with flushed cheeks represents a bacchante - a follower of the wine god Bacchus. Though Vig�e-Lebrun was a successful portraitist, this work was probably not intended as an image of a particular individual. Instead, the mythological theme allowed the artist to paint an openly erotic image and demonstrate her skill capturing lively facial expressions.

Madame Perregaux was the wife of a Parisian banker whose clients included the third Marquess of Hertford and the artist herself. The painting was bought by the fourth Marquess of Hertford to the present Wallace Collection.

Vig�e-Lebrun, ravished by the charm of her own appearance, and hardly able to paint a male sitter, continued the 18th century’s cult of women. In Vig�e-Lebrun we have the last view of eighteen-century woman - who had begun as a goddess, became a courtesan, and now ended all heart - before Napoleon and War banished her from the centre of events.

The sitter of this portrait, Madame d’Aguesseau de Fresnes belonged by birth and by marriage to several families of France’s nobilities. The portrait depicts her seated on a sofa upholstered in green lampas with a floral design. Her costume was certainly devised by Vig�e-Lebrun, who enjoyed dressing her sitters to suit her own sense of style.

Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), wife of Louis XVI, was the daughter of Maria Theresa, empress of Austria and queen of Hungary and Bohemia. By the late 1770s, Vig�e-Lebrun had become her painter of choice, and in this role she produced a number of portraits of her patroness as decorations for the royal palaces or as gifts of state. The present portrait of the twenty-eight-year-old queen is an anonymous, undoubtedly period, copy of a painting executed in the spring of 1783.

Reichsgraf Moritz von Fries (1777-1828) was a collector of drawings in Vienna where Vig�e-Lebrun executed this pastel portrait.

This portrait shows the influence of Rubens on Mme Vig�e Lebrun and the direct connection here with the portrait of the artist’s wife, Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat is apparent.

Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland was of modest origins, the daughter of Pierre Roland and Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Daris. It is uncertain where she met her future husband, the Earl of Mornington (later Marquess Wellesley), but it has been suggested that they encountered each other in the Palais Royal. When Vig�e painted her portrait, Mlle Roland and Lord Mornington had already lived together as man and wife for six years and she was the mother of three children.

Madame de Staël, daughter of the French minister of finance, Jacques Necker, achieved fame on the basis of her turbulent lifestyle and two literary works: De l’Allemagne (1810), a portrait of Germany, its customs, literature and philosophy, and her novel Corinne ou l’ltalie (1807). In this work based on her travels in Italy in the company of August Wilhelm Schlegel, after Napoleon had exiled her from Paris, she records her impressions of Italy in glowing tones through the mouth-piece of the fictitious Italian poetess Corinne. Vig�e-Lebrun portrays her in the role of Corinne wearing an antique robe, with a lyre on her lap, as a female Orpheus. Behind this figure there is a cliff crowned by a classical monopteros, and a sweeping landscape that fades into the distance with gentle, green hills and blue mountain peaks. The concept of the classical and the romantic which Madame de Staël was first to use in its present sense, are echoed in these two landscape types. The flawless idealization that marks so many of this artist’s works is countered here by the powerful vitality of the face: a mature, confident and energetic woman of astute intellect who is by no means identical with the role of glowing and effusive rapture.

The sitter of thie signed and dated canvas, executed in St. Petersburg, was Princess Anna Ivanonva Bariatinsky (1774-1825), later Countess Nikolai Alexandrovich Tolstoy.

In his boyhood likeness, Prince Heinrich Lubomirski is shown as the Genius of Fame. His nude is a painted paraphrase of a famous Hellenistic Crouching Venus by �lisabeth Vig�e-Lebrun, the tireless French painter and diarist, who traveled throughout Europe and Russia in search of courtly commissions, especially after the French Revolution.

Thanks to talent and connections, Vig�e-Lebrun was accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture at age 28 and became a favourite of Queen Marie-Antoinette. her manner of painting captures the reign of the carefree Louis XVI.

This painting was made for the Medici collection of artists’ self-portraits the year after the artist left revolutionary France. The portrait on the easel resembles Marie-Antoinette, the famous painter’s most famous subject.

The daughter and pupil of a minor Parisian painter, Louis Vig�e, Madame Vig�e-Lebrun was an attractive and charming woman, who specialised in the attractive and charming portrayal of women and children while remaining a competent portraitist of men. Eighteenth-century notions of graceful spontaneity may strike twentieth-century viewers as arch or sentimental; nevertheless, she pioneered a new style. Her fashionable portraits in the simplified dress called à la grecque dispense with Baroque props of columns or curtains to demonstrate ‘natural’ manners and feelings, anticipating the Neo-classical portraits of David.

Madame Vig�e-Lebrun fled the French Revolution in 1789, avoiding the fate of her most illustrious patron, Queen Marie-Antoinette, to become an international success in the capitals of Europe. She returned to her native city after the Restoration in 1814 and gave an account of her early life and later tribulations and triumphs in the highly readable, if unreliable, Memoirs published in 1835.

The painter Claude Joseph Vernet, she recalls, advised her to study the Italian and Flemish masters but above all to follow nature. This picture is an autograph replica of a self portrait painted in Brussels in 1782 which wittily records her admiration of a famous Flemish masterpiece, Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden, known as the ‘Chapeau de Paille’. ‘[Its] great effect’, she wrote, ‘resides in the two different kinds of illumination which simple daylight and the light of the sun create…This painting…has inspired me to the point that I made my own portrait…in search of the same effect.’

The bright gleam and the general radiance of direct and reflected outdoor light as represented in Rubens’s picture are indeed carefully noted, but Madame Vig�e-Lebrun takes care also to record her debt to nature. She shows herself in the open against a cloud-flecked sky, and - not surprisingly since she is both sitter and painter - as almost a personification of the art of painting. For this fictitious excursion into the fields, but also to demonstrate her powers of observation, she wears a genuine chapeau de paille, unlike Rubens’s sitter whose hat is actually made of beaver felt. To the dashing ostrich feather she has added a wreath of freshly picked rustic flowers. Her hair is her own, not a wig, and is left unpowdered. Where Susanna Lunden modestly crosses her arms above her waist and peers out from below her hat, Madame Vig�e-Lebrun extends her unaffected friendship to the viewer. Most natural of all, however, is her charming bosom. For unlike Rubens’s beauty, whose breasts are moulded by her tight corset, Madame Vig�e-Lebrun lets it plainly be seen in her low d�colletage that she has no need of such artifice.

The artist was influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas on childhood and maternal love. Her self-portrait with her daughter is outstanding for the sweetness and simplicity of the attitudes.

The artist painted herself in 1789 with her daughter Jeanne-Lucie-Louise (called Julie, 1780-1829) for the comte d’Angiviller, who was ‘directeur des Bâtiments du roi.’ This portrait has a marked neo-classical flavour.

This portrait shows the Duchess of Caderousse, posed simply in the costume of a countrywoman. It was painted by �lisabeth Vig�e-Lebrun, the favourite portrait painter of Queen Marie-Antoinette.

Vigee-Lebrun received early training from her father, a painter in pastels. Other teachers and those helpful in her career were Doyen, Vernet, Davesne and Briard. She also copied the old masters, particularly Dutch art. She soon became a celebrated portrait painter and was appointed court painter to Marie-Antoinette. She became a member of the Academy in 1783. She had to leave France in 1789 because of her court connections. From that time she travelled widely visiting Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, London, St Petersburg and Switzerland, and was inundated with academic honours and commissions. Her emotional, idealising portraits of women and children, which were often criticised for their sentimental touches, were representative of an international style of portraiture already in transition; the characteristics come out more fully in her many self-portraits.

This group portrait, a rare example of the conversation piece in Vig�e-Lebrun’s oeuvre, was conceived as a tribute to friendship and motherhood. The two women regularly attended the artist’s musical soir�es before the French Revolution.

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1787, where critics praised the brilliance of the artist’s technique and the elegance of the poses. The reviewers also focused on the intensity of the motherly and filial affection expressed in the interaction between the marquise de Roug� and her sons.

This picture, showing the head of an attractive woman, made by the then greatly esteemed portrait painter �lisabeth Vig�e-Lebrun, recalls the Rococo. In pastel - a popular medium in the 18th century - the artist modeled the laurel-wreath head of an allegorical figure of peace over a preparatory drawing in black chalk. The work was intended as a study for a painting (La paix ramenant l’Abondance). While the theme and technique are conventional, the flattened composition and the idealized beauty of the head with its cool lustrous and porcelain-like skin tones correspond to Classicist ideas.