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Arts & Activities, March, 2005 by Guy Hubbard

ABOUT THIS SELF-PORTRAIT

It would be strange if anyone painted a portrait while dressed in all the finery the artist is wearing in this self-portrait. There has to be a story behind it all, and there is. The fact is that Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-LeBrun greatly admired the paintings of the Flemish artist, Peter Paul Rubens, and studied some of his work while on a visit to the city of Antwerp. She was so impressed with a painting by Rubens of his sister-in-law that she made a painting of her own very much like the Rubens picture. But, instead of painting someone else, she painted it as a self-portrait.

This picture is painted in the style she used for most of the wealthy aristocrats who had their portraits painted by her, and it was very popular when other people saw it. In fact, it helped get her elected to the Royal Academy of France when she was only 28--something that was very rare for women to achieve at this time. So, in many ways, this painting can be looked at as a demonstration of her abilities as a portrait artist.

The portrait is a dazzling display of painting luxurious clothing to make it look realistic. For this occasion, she shows herself dressed in a puce silk dress with a ruffled lace edging. The dress is held in at the waist with a woven gold sash. She is also wearing a black mantilla around her shoulders while her ear-drops are translucent and glowing. Flowers and feathers adorn the straw hat. Any one of these materials would be difficult to paint with the level of realism she displays; but she seems to handle all of them with ease in this picture.

Madame LeBrun loved dressing up and this painting shows that. She also encouraged sitters to dress up in interesting costumes she kept in her studio especially for that purpose. In contrast to the exotic costume she is shown wearing in tiffs portrait, her actual dresses worn while painting were cotton smocks with a ribbon around her hair to hold it in place.

The face, itself, is probably very much like the artist because she had a talent for painting accurate likenesses of people. One of her greatest abilities, however, was not only capturing the appearance of her clients but also the kind of people they were.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Elisabeth-Louise Vigee was born in Paris before the French Revolution and lived until she was 87--long after the Revolution had ended. Her father was a portrait artist and her mother was a hairdresser. They were neither rich nor poor at a time when most people in France were very poor and only a handful of aristocratic people were rich.

Boys who wanted to become artists had to go through a very long and difficult training, but, because she was a girl, Elisabeth was not allowed to enter this kind of training program. However, she learned enough from watching her father and from meeting his artist friends. She also took some drawing lessons, although girls were not allowed to draw human figures.

She was so gifted, in fact, that at age 12 she became a portrait artist and was quite successful partly because of the novelty of her young age. Later, she added to her artistic education by being given permission to visit and copy private collections of paintings that included works by such great masters as Rubens, Van Dyke and Rembrandt.

By age 20 she was well established as a portrait artist. Before photography was invented, the only way people could have a record of what they or their family looked like was through painted portraits. So there was a thriving trade in portraits for richer people, and this is the group for whom Elisabeth worked. Her careful, realistic painting was matched by her ability to capture the character of people. She also flattered her sitters by making them better looking than they really were. All this made her popular with the French nobility, eventually including the King and Queen of France. In fact, she became a special painter to the Queen, Mary Antoinette.

Her rapid success was due in part to her artistic ability and also to the fact that she was very pretty. Equally important was that she had excellent social skills, which led to meeting influential people who helped her by introducing her to their friends. In fact, portrait painting at the time provided one of the most reliable routes to social advancement--especially for people who were low-born as she was--and she made full use of it throughout her long life.

At age 20 she married an art dealer, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre LeBrun, and she changed her name to Vigee-LeBrun. Her husband sold paintings and other works of art, especially to rich people who could afford them. All the money that wives earned in those days went to their husbands, so whatever she earned from painting portraits belonged to her husband. It so happened that her husband squandered money so all that she earned was lost. Only after she was divorced later in her life did she make much money, and then she became wealthy from her painting. She always said that she didn't understand finances and that she painted for the love of art; but the fact was that she was a shrewd businesswoman and charged very high prices for her work.