One of many self-portraits
“I have to work like a slave to keep myself, my daughter, her teachers, the maid, a domestic, a carriage, a cook, a household and, finally, to cover the perpetual expense of travelling. What would I have done without my work? If I had been ill, you would have let me starve; since instead of saving money you have spent it on women who deceived you, you have gambled and lost, Monsieur; a thousand and one people have told me that you see me in your own image, but I am not you. I will neither let my fortune fall into the hands of strangers, since it has been too hard to earn and I do not know a single person low enough to profit by it, nor will I take advice from anyone.”
“[I] cared so little for money that I scarcely knew the value of it … my closest friends all know that M. LeBrun took all the money I earned, on the plea of investing it in his business. I often had no more than six francs in my pocket … the Princess Lubomirska remitted twelve thousand francs to me, out of which I begged Mr LeBrun to let me keep forty; but he would not let me have even that, alleging he needed the whole sum for a promissory note … “
Friends and readers,
In her fine aesthetic and feminist study, Mary Sheriff labels our heroine The Exceptional Woman, with a subtitle pointing us to “the Cultural Politics of Art” (University of Chicago Press). This in a period where we find successful professional woman artists (Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Angelica Kauffman, Ann Vallayer-Coster, Mary Beale, Maria Sybilla Merian, Anna Dorothea Therbusch, Rosalba Carriera, to name only a few and keep within the 1660-1815 tranch. Even in this rich Enlightenment interlude for women, Vigée-LeBrun’s output of paintings (in the hundreds), her extensive network of well-known patrons, supporters far flung across Europe, the money she clearly made to support a very comfortable upper class life-style, and unashamed self-promotion, makes her exceptional and important.
Yet there are similarities: in common with a number of women artists, early on she assumed an independence from her husband, in effect lived the life of a single woman (even if she had a husband in tow she was the money-earner). The woman with a career, the professional was often a woman with no husband to support her. She exploited (did not thwart or ignore or defy) stereotypes of ideal womanhood: she acted out myths (the genius child, treated as an equal by aristocrats, self-taught, it was her father who encouraged her). As with her portraits of herself, those of her with her daughter, Julie, are very much posed, & transparently pointed, so I’ve chosen one just of Julie as less common:
Just Julie LeBrun (eventually Nigris)
The mirror image resembles Elisabeth’s face closely
She frequently flattered her clients, especially women where she repeatedly gives them expressionless un-individuated faces (to the point, they can look like dolls and could have been left blank)
Caroline Murat (wife of King of Naples, one of Napoleon’s generals, 1806) — often LeBrun gives women hefty arms whose structure shows a lack of anatomical care
If I seem hard on her, it’s because I believe we do an artist no favor except we offer careful analyses. She is a wonderful colorist, and can capture psychology in a face when she wants to, is especially acute painting male artists she sympathizes with,
Hubert Robert (1788)
She suffuses those she loves with deep sensuality, her brother’s skin breathes at us
Etienne LeBrun, Portrait of the Artist’s Brother (1773)
If you want to see just what a genius in the areas she is superb in, look at this album of images from Female Artists in History: a number are not well-known
Daughter of the actor, Caillot, 1787
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What differentiates her — almost unique for women as such from before the 19th century: she wrote and published herself before she died, a 2 volume autobiography, Souvenirs, and once the revolution “hit,” and she fled, discovered liberty and enjoyment in traveling about (rather like a tourist at times). If this blog can contribute to the numerous articles and some book-length studies (don’t miss Gita May’s; a third is Angela Gooden’s The Sweetness of Life, which I have not read), and catalogues from exhibits, I can point out to those just discovering her, the readily available Memoirs of Madame Vigée-LeBrun translated by Strachey, is a very much abridged, censored (expurgated) and poor translation of the Memoirs. Avoid it. Souvenirs must be read whole to appreciate the artist and woman: in the original French, Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, Souvenirs (1 & 2), ed. Claudine Hermann (Des Femmes, 1986), Englished by Sian Evans and published in the UK in two volumes (Camden Books, 1989, ISBN 0948491396).
If you obtain and the whole two volumes (whether in English or her French), you emerge with understanding and appreciation of the real hardships the woman knew (however she denies this), and how she can show real insight into all sorts of situations (from a young age), places, landscapes. Her book opens with 12 letters to a trusted friend, Princess Kurkan, then 32 chapters of a chronological life, 9 letters to another woman friend, a Polish princess, Helene Massalska (married into Potocka family), 3 more chapters bringing us up to the last phase of her life (she was 80 when she wrote the book), and closing with ten witty portraits, notable personalities (Benjamin Franklin, Talleyrand, Madame de Genlis, Voltaire, David among them).
The story line of the middle chapters of the book are travel literature under pressure. She flees the revolution across the Alps, across Northern Italy (Venice, Milan), until she gets to Rome where she tries to recreate the life she had known in Paris (complete with salon and hard work in a studio) then, without much explanation for the move, south to Naples, where she met and painted Emma Lady Hamilton,
Lady Hamilton as Sybil (this is typical work for LeBrun)
There follows a long interesting time in Russia where she made many friends (St Petersburg and Moscow), and finally (when it was safe), home to France, but not to stay put as yet: she then has an interlude in England where she again meets the gifted, rich, intelligent (a delightful section, evoking London), and re-starts her career once again, and finally back to France for retirement in Louveciennes (yes where the Impressionists settled and painted later in the 19th century), with trips to Versailles. Here is just one of the countless portraits she did (she would have liked to do landscape she said, but there was no money in it) during her travels: the brilliant: Count Giovanni Paisiello, seeming rapt while in mid-action at the clavichord
Giovanni Paisiello, 1791
As with so many other women artists of the 18th century, her art is as good early on as it ever gets to be.
She had gotten along very well with Marie-Antoinette, painted her numerous times — why her life was in significant danger. It’s not a feat for her values are the values of these aristocratic women and men — that’s why starting in the 1790s she floats through Europe almost at times as if there had been no revolution — while taking advantage of it – she divorced her husband in 1794.
Just be careful to take with a grain of salt some of her assertions and some of the more spectacular scenes. She mis-characterizes most reactionary people, with an eye continually to dismiss anything smacking of reformism. She does have encounters with the destitute: there is a graphic description of poverty in Letter 10, where Vigee-Le Brun writes about visiting the poor with her friend, the middle-aged and increasingly eccentric Mme Dubarry, who, Le Brun says, was herself from “the bottom of the social ladder”.
“We often went together to visit some poor unfortunate, and I still remember her righteous anger one day when she came upon a wretched woman about to give birth with nothing to alleviate her suffering. ‘How is this!’ cried Mme Dubarry. ‘You have neither linen nor wine nor broth?’ ‘Alas! Nothing at all Madame.’ Straightway we returned to the chateau; Mme Dubarry called for her housekeeper and other servants who had not carried out her orders. I cannot begin to describe the fury with which she spoke, while ordering them to pack a bundle of linen for the poor sick woman as well as some soup and Bordeaux wine.”
This is a Lady Bountiful scenario, but the “anger” and “fury” does show an awareness of the social problems, and there isn’t much feeling that the broth and wine will put anything right. For herself, her misfortunes (in Russia) are physical: she cannot bear and makes us feel the cold — or noise when it disturbs her concentration when working and needed sleep. Whenever she finds someone who is pro-revolutionary and can point to where some aristocrat gave him or her a present, or bribe or job, she points this out. The whole point of the revolution was to destroy this way of getting on and substitute meritocracy, skill, education, to get rid of this kind of rottenness.
Some examples: There are the parties she puts on or attends where the conversation is always of the highest order. She claims to be the originator of a few new hairstyles and or fashions. The adoption of green veils in Naples quickly imitated. She invents novel entertainments for her guests which are well received.
In Venice when the Doge drops a ring into the water, we are told a thousand cannons fire “instantly.” Did Venice possess a thousand cannons. Venice itself was not fortified though there may have been surrounding forts. The Mediterranean powers did not use the large warships like the British, French, ans Spanish in the open Atlantic, which could carry 80 guns. They mostly used comparatively small galleys (oared with a single mast and sail). No matter how the cannons are arranged, it is not possible for them to be situated in such a way that all gunners could see and immediately respond to the Doge’s action. It’s unlikely more than one side of one ship could easily see the Doge’s action. Even without projectiles in the cannons, you don’t want to be in front of them when they are fired. Ships would need to be lined up end to end or be quite widely spaced. If land forts were involved there would be separations measured in miles. Most likely one ship would be close to the Doge with either the bow or stern nearest and an officer relaying an order to fire. Other ships or forts would react to the muzzle blasts or sounds of the first cannons fired. We all know about the delay of thunder from lightening strikes. If there were a really large number of cannons, the first volley or two would be fairly distinct, given human reaction time, but would quickly build to a cacophony as more distant cannons were fired.
Her daughter is nothing less than a genius of exceptional merit. If it wasn’t for these revolutions coming along and spoiling things (and the inferior husband), her life is at times near perfection.You must be alert to the reality she is not reliable. But like Angelica Kauffman, Vigee-LeBrun shows more or less truthfully how professional women artists had to present themselves, to avoid accusations of sexual transgression. As a woman living apart from her husband, she was accused of having affairs, early on with Charles Alexander de Calonne who looks very sweet-tempered here.
Charles-Alexander de Calonne, 1784
We might think maybe she did; but I get the feeling she is too cunning and hard to let go in this way, even if for those who knew how, contraceptive techniques of various were available (just kidding). For a reading of these Memoirs, see Jean Owens Schaefer, “The Souvenirs of Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun: The Self-Imaging of the Artist and the Woman,” International Journal of Women’s Studies, 4:1 (1980):35-49.). We must not attribute too much calculation or control: hers was a life of wandering exile and self-containment, with a daughter by side, and later (when the daughter was estranged) two nieces by her side, Caroline de Riviere, Etienne’s daughter, and Eugenei Le Franc, who showed a talent at portraiture. She outlived many of her friends as well as her daughter.
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Out of the literature about her, I pick two strains or themes an observer or reader might follow. First, many art critics are taken by her work and write beautiful art criticism, pleasurable to read. Julian Barnes puts me in mind of Diderot: from an exhibit he saw at the Grand Palais (quoted from the London Review of Books:
She was very accomplished, excellent at flesh and all the varieties of material that covered it: the muslin and lace, the satins and silks, the straw hats and the flowers that lodged in them; she was good at and with children. She was also very professional, knowing how to disguise physical fault and accentuate any hint of beauty; she knew the most winning relationship between parted lips and visible teeth. She pleased her sitters; her sitters pleased her. She was expert at a kind of formal informality. In this, she resembles Cecil Beaton at the court of the young Elizabeth II: both produced a very highly worked art whose intended effect was of naturalness. She was very French. She spent three years in England, much of it – from Matlock to the Isle of Wight – reminding her of Switzerland. When visiting Bath she thought the city’s effect from a distance was ‘immense’; but up close, you realised its architecture ‘was not in good taste’. She also complained of Reynolds’s art that it was somewhat ‘unfinished’. Her own painting is always, always finished.
A tension between artifice and naturalness: this is where her art comes from, and what it delivers. The clothes are loose, the hair usually unpowdered, the pose informal, the smile of just the right size. All her aristocrats look noble, all her mothers devoted, all her children cute; even the background furnishings and fittings are loyally supportive. The charm is tremendously calculated. And charm is dangerous, double-edged. Take one of the century’s most famous portraits of a child, her Alexandrine-Emilie Brongniart of 1788, now in the National Gallery in London. This seven-year-old girl is all in white, a pocket minuet of muslin and silk, while her auburn curls escape from a knotted white scarf. She is rummaging in a sewing bag from which she has just removed a red ball of wool. Naturally – or rather, ‘naturally’ (since she would ‘normally’, i.e. in ‘real life’, be looking where she is rummaging) – she fixes us with big round eyes and a cautious, disarming half-smile. There are no two ways about this picture. Either you want to adopt this adorable bundle of girlhood; or else you want to strangle the knowing little moppet.
I don’t have copies of these, but invite my reader to contemplate this remarkably warm picture: the lady has suspended her reading for “a few moments of thoughtful reflection” (see May, pp 136-38). Look at her dress, the colors, the textures of things, the symmetry of relationships
Princess Catherine Dolgorouky (1796?)
Her relationship with her daughter repays study as well. What we discover counters or contradicts the continual pairing in LeBrun’s paintings of the two as intertwined lovingly A brilliant essay by Katherine Ann Jensen, Marriage, and Nostalgia: Mother-Daughter Relations in Writings by Isabelle de Charriere and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 19:2 (Autumn, 2000):285-313, traces the early devoted relationship of mother and daughter, an apparent deep bonding. The assumption is that Julie will mirror her mother, and her life be shaped by her mother’s values. In fact, Julie broke away rather early, defying her mother’s choice of a husband for her and hard-working way of life. LeBrun wanted to validate her success through making her daughter secure, by marrying her to rank, money, high gifts; she saw Nigris, the secretary of a family friends as “un homme sans talent, sans fortune, sans nom.”
Perhaps LeBrun was trying for Julie, to lead her to create an independent sense of self through a partner who would place her high in society and enable her to thrive there, create a self as she, Elisabeth, had; or, she wanted to retain control over the girl by marrying her to her own candidate. Her husband sided with Julie; she could not convince the girl herself that Nigris would not make a good partner, would not bring happiness. LeBrun felt bitter, blamed the governess, blaming reading romantic novels (Nigris looked like a “pale” melancholy hero). And so they parted, mother and daughter. But the girl did not build a different self. Nigris turned out to be a man much like her father: gambled, went to prostitutes. What we should pay attention to (I think) is the misfortune did not eventually bring mother and daughter together as sometimes happens or might have been expected. Julie did not try to re-join her mother, she left her husband seven years later, and stayed proudly away; we are told that fifteen years later (at age 39), she somehow grew sick (lost weight) and died.
The interest for Jensen is that in what actually happened insofar as we can judge it does not cohere with Freudian style paradigms of parent-child symbiosis; the mother-daughter paradigm so typical of women’s art, women’s writing is still somehow central but we have not understood it for real, the true nuances of developing relationships.
This is Elisabeth’s study, a drawing of Marie Antoinette’s baby for the famous picture of Antoinette as mother in grandiose dress with her children all about her
There is so much material, so many pictures to explore and to learn, just add diligent work in archives and/or studying the art and norms of France and other women artists and writers in this spectacularly changing era. Gentle reader, as Goodden doubtless suggests, Elisabeth is great fun, and you will have much pleasure, learn a lot about a woman’s life, art, and this era.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Waough! I am grateful to you, Ellen, for digging as deeply as you have into this subject & “material, so many pictures to explore and to learn, just add diligent work in archives and/or studying the art and norms of France and other women artists and writers in this spectacularly changing era.” “Waough! je n’en reviens pas!” as the French say our Wow! in the franglais De Gaulle disparaged with his mighty boom. But just Wow! at all the research you get into along with all your other projects. We who just dip in a toe & withdraw because it is too deep thank you for a blog like this. I come away from reading it, knowing more about Vigée-LeBrun without having to go into all the material & having no big book of plates or any wonderful exhibit nearby to view, research would be hard work. I have so long admired her paintings, even posted one of my little albums of artwork on fb back during her NYC exhibit a few years ago, but I feel this morning I know her better than I ever have as an artist, a woman, wife & mother, serious, ambitious, hard working, & “hard” as you say, these successful females often are, have had to be, now & then. You have enlightened, instructed, inspired me. But now I won’t dig any deeper into Mme. Vigée-LeBrun, myself, because, butterfly learner (even dilettante) that I am, I must be flitting on off into Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris’s flowers & get my album of his paintings gathered to post. Merci beaucoup for this morning’s sweet, clear & revealing reverie. Judith
As I said on the listserv (and also face-book), I’ve been preparing for this (it might be said) for 11 years on and off. I read with WomenWriters@yahoo at the time Vigee-Lebrun’s Souvenirs in the 2 volume Evans’s translation (from interlibrary loan), but I also bought the 2 volume French edition and read/skimmed that too. It was sometime after that I read Sheriff, and now recently Gita May. Articles came my way now and again. Then the internet is filled with images if you have the title (usually a person’s name) and Vigee-LeBrun as artist.
She is a “bigger” figure than Angelica Kauffman, arguable the “biggest” woman from the point of view of materials, pictures left, and successful career. She is not easy to like until you read the Souvenirs and then (as I tried to suggest) they are unreliable.
Doing these however far apart help give me a meaning in life — as the friends and reading on listservs, the teaching and taking courses. It’s all reading and some writing, but it is in my character to do it. Sometimes I’m surprised to think how far I’ve gone socially since Jim died – and yet it is but a small set of connections. I owe much to all my friends here, you are truly one of them.
Excellent blog, Ellen. Le Brun is the only woman painter deemed worthy of inclusion in my childhood art book, edited by socialist and pacifist Rockwell Kent (who was not the one who chose the paintings.) He is often critical of the painters at hand because of their politics or painting: he, however, is generous towards Le Brun, saying she was “one of the most attractive …who served the court and aristocracy of that doomed regime.” He refers to her as one of the “good souls” and says he is glad she did not suffer too greatly from the Revolution. The painting shown is a lovely one of Le Brun in Greco-Roman dress with her daughter’s arms lovingly placed around her neck, her cheek placed on her mother’s neck.
One might say that painting is her signature painting. But early in life, or as soon as the daughter could separate herself, she did. As did Madame de Genlis’s daughter. Genlis’s daughter openly hated her mother for coercing her into a marriage that made the daughter miserable and then preventing a divorce during the period divorce was available. Genlis’s Adele et Theodore (alluded to by Austen in Emma presents the daughter surrogate as totally taken in and obedient; it presents emotional blackmail as the way to teach a child.)
From what I’ve read there are no documents giving any real clue to LeBrun’s daughter’s attitude. Your childbook book’s author took the surface at face value; if you read the abridged and censored by Strachey, there is little to counter it. She did suffer but even the 2 volumes of Souvenirs is mostly success, triumph, cheerfulness. I’ll lay a bet that Goodden also just stays at surface level. May does not nor Sherriff.
Yet (I admit) LeBrun is hard to resist; I liked her myself in spite of my desire not to like her 🙂 And I admire Genlis for her courage, intelligence and ability to survive. Both of them survivors.
I imagined Kent to mean she was lucky she didn’t get guillotined, but my guess is he didn’t know enough about her to question any surface reading.
There is just so much more to be known about these earlier women than there once was. Unlike some, LeBrun got out early; she knew she’d be a target so in that sense she was not in danger. The Parlement did not go kidnapping people and hauling them back. Then she was careful not to offend whenever possible; she never presented herself as a proto-feminist as did Stael so she made few personal enemies.