I was in my twenties when I first came across Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s famous self-portrait in the National Gallery. It’s a three quarter length painting of a confident forty year old lady standing looking straight back at the viewer. There is no coy glance or furtively draped clothing. This is a self-portrait by a woman who is proud of what she does and knows both her own worth as well as her own mind.
The whole painting is refreshing, simple and emanating a sense of who she was.
She wears her hat with a flourish the flowers and plume showing off her eye for style. (And, from an artist’s point of view, she uses the lines it creates to draw our gaze down to her face). The flowers and plume also contrast with the calm attire of her dress and shawl. I suspect that it is no accident that the flowers are blue, white and red; when she painted the portrait she was painting in the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Interestingly Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun clothes are a combination of styles from the time. We can see that she is wearing expensive materials, yet typically they should have been in a far lighter material: muslin. The following year Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun paints the Queen in a famous portrait (Marie Antoinette en chemise, where the Queen was shown in a muslin dress, which was perceived as so scandalous that the public likened it to seeing her in her negligée). Therefore in her self-portrait, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun takes the rustic, simplistic cut of the new style gown but wears it in a far heavier and more, traditional and sumptuous material. Why? Because that’s what she prefers. She’s taken the Queen’s new style and made it her own.
This simplicity continues with her hair. Considering when she painted this she was surrounded by women all trying to lavishly outdo each other with Marie Antoinette at the center of the court, you would have thought that Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun would have wanted her hair to have been the same as the other ladies. This was the 1780s and in France, like in Britain, if you were a someone you would wear your hair powdered. Not Le Brun – again she’s adapted the new rustic style and there’s not a whiff of pomade in sight.
Making your own mark, having your own style and being you might be very fashionable nowadays but anything that split from the norm both in her time and frankly throughout most of history has always been seen as a threat rather than an affirmation of yourself. Yet Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun doesn’t care. She’s successful enough that she can quite literally afford to be her own woman.
The focus of the self-portrait is her gaze and the tools of her trade; the palette and range of daubed brushes, proudly presented to us. Make no mistake, she wants us to know exactly what she does. I love the implication in the painting. She’s looking right at us in a painting she has done and not only is it is superbly executed but she knows this. She is a woman, very much in a man’s world, and she is very successfully making her own living. There is no apologising for her skill and ability.
Born into pre-revolutionary France Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun deified convention as a teenager. Not only was she an accomplished painter but she was largely self-taught. Her father did give her some training but not that much considering that he died when she was only twelve. Not daunted by this, she then went on to set up her own business as a portrait painter. I admire the quality of her determination and the level of her self-confidence – she knows how good she is.
By the age of nineteen she was so successful that she was stopped from painting because she was earning money from her portraits while not paying the city guild. This was only a temporary hiccup for her as she applied to and was accepted into her father’s old institution, the Académie de Saint-Luc, thus allowing her to re-open her studio. Not bad for someone so young and downright impressive considering that she was a woman living in the second half of the eighteenth century.
On paper she made a good marriage which opened up the world of the French court to her. She painted Marie Antoinette so many times that people thought she was the queen’s official portrait painter.
Yet her husband was a gambler, and then there’s the small matter of the French Revolution, which as a royalist portrait painter meant that she had to flee France. Leaving her husband behind she took their daughter, travelling across Europe and then visiting Russia before finally being able to return to France. She was a devoted single mother who throughout her life painted to support herself and her daughter.
This was a lady who had a lot to contend with. An artist, a mother and a woman working against European society that expected men to paint, not women. There were others – Angelica Kauffman to name one (the only woman who was in the original group of painters who set up the Royal Academy) – but as always is the case with women, men made sure that that women painters were the exception, not the rule.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun is an inspiring woman. She must have had days, weeks, months I suspect where life took its own turn and she would have felt as thwarted as the rest of us. Yet I’ve often thought of her – if she could overcome all of what life threw at her, then I’ve told myself plenty of times that I shouldn’t grumble. However I didn’t know any of this when I first looked at her portrait and then bought a copy of it to pin onto my wall. What drew me to her then and still does to this day is her gaze. Her confidence has inspired me for decades.
