Vigée-Le Brun was born in 1755 in Paris, France. She exhibited a gift for the arts from a young age but was rejected from formal training on the basis of her gender. Instead, she worked in a history painter's atelier, took oil painting lesson and visited the cities important galleries.
In the 1770s she started taking clients and by 1783 she had claimed one of the four seats reserved for women at the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, due to direct intervention from Queen Marie Antoinette, one of Vigée-Le Brun most famous subjects, and King Louis XVI.
Self Portrait in a Straw Hat
Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun debuted her self-portrait at the prestigious Paris Salon in 1787. The portrait shows her lips parted in a demure smile, cradling her young daughter, effusing maternal intimacy. This shocked the Salon because the painting ignored the rules about facial representation.
Self-Portrait with her Daughter
While the idea of a smile with teeth showing was not exactly new, to have Madame Vigée-Le Brun identify with this gesture is seen as throwing away the rulebook of Western art. This teeth-baring grin was never intended for the refashioning of Mother and Child, one of the oldest motifs in the Western canon.
Despite the criticism she received, Vigée-Le Brun quickly rose to fame which was made possible by the rapidly changing world around her. She had a knack for understanding the new style of modern individuals, earning her recognition as a key painter of 18th-century France. Here's a collection of Vigée-Le Brun best works of art:
The Marquise de Pezay, and the Marquise de Rougé with Her Sons Alexis and Adrien
Marie Antoinette
Portrait de la comtesse Maria Theresia Bucquoi, 1793
Lady Folding a Letter
Varvara Golovina
Emma, Lady Hamilton
Charles-Alexandre de Calonne
Portrait of the Duchesse de Caderousse
Anna Ivanovna Baryatinskaya Tolstoy
Anna Ivanovna Baryatinskaya Tolstoy
Julie as Flora
Vigée Le Brun Baronne de Crussol
Ekaterina Feodorovna Baryatinskaya-Dolgorukova
Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth - Varvara Ivanovna Narishkine
