Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) nearly lost her head during the French Revolution. She had chummied up to Ancien Régime society and Queen Marie Antoinette, painting over 30 portraits of the Queen and her family, and becoming her court painter. But Élisabeth escaped the guillotine, fleeing in 1789, and prospered abroad until finally returning to Paris in 1802. Her exile in the capitals of Europe was a progress of distinction; an international celebrity, she was feted for her art and skill and charm. In later life, her beguiling memoirs made her a heroine of the Romantics. She left Paris for London in 1803 with diamonds sewn into her stockings to protect them from highwaymen. She became rich. Typically for the time, however, this forceful woman’s huge earnings (she was the best paid portraitist in Europe) were entrusted to her dissolute husband. He swindled her.
No woman could prosper as an artist without a progressive parent. As Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘in the past a father would have died rather than let his daughter look upon a naked man’. Painting was for men. But Élisabeth’s artist father, Louis Vigée, saw her youthful pastel portraits and announced – ‘You are to be an artist, my child.’ However, to succeed, a student needed access to the Académie. There were just four places for women, but anyone connected with the art trade was barred – and Monsieur Le Brun was a picture dealer. Luckily, her cosiness with Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI opened the door. Yet her modernity nearly proved fatal. In 1787, she caused a scandal when a self-portrait with her daughter was exhibited at the Salon. It showed her smiling and open-mouthed, which was considered intolerably coarse. A journal commented that this ‘finds no precedent among the Ancients… in smiling, she shows her teeth.’ A further scandal followed – in a 1783 portrait of Marie Antoinette (Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress) the queen sports an English-style straw hat adorned with feathers and a bow. And she is uncorsetted! ‘Indecent’ said the critics, ‘unregal’.
Elisabeth had wanted to reflect a more natural style, but the painting was withdrawn. The influence of Rousseau, and his emphasis on the innocence of children, on maternal love, is seen in the self-portraits with her daughter Julie. They have disturbed feminists, conflicted by her unfashionable sentimentality (and the coquettish simplicity of her sitters). Simone de Beauvoir dismissed Vigée Le Brun as narcissistic: ‘Her personality is the only subject that interests her: Mme Vigée-Lebrun never tired of putting her smiling maternity on her canvases.’ 
But her technical skill cannot be ignored, nor her Rubensian colouring. And it is to Rubens that she turns for glazing, composition and light. Her Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1783) is a homage to the technical virtuosity of Rubens’ portrait of Susannah Fourment ‘which delighted and inspired me to such a degree that I made a portrait of myself at Brussels, striving to obtain the same effects… its force lies in the two different lights – those of the sun, and of the reflected sunlight … Perhaps one must be a painter to appreciate all the power here displayed by Rubens.’ Later she would turn to Raphael for inspiration.
Her portraits may not dissect – a contemporary called them ‘brilliantly graceful’ – but they contain coded gestures, subtle revelations about the subject that refute accusations of superficiality. One must not be seduced by modish sneering at her grand clients, her idealised likenesses. She was a diligent, witty, society portrait painter who managed her professional life after the Revolution with flair and left an oeuvre remarkable for its casual elegance. She fuses the exuberance of the Rococo with the rigour of Neo-classicism. Le Brun put it simply – she had ‘a passion for painting… a divine passion that will end only with my life.’
Mary Cassatt once sniffed – ‘She painted herself.’ Yet it is Le Brun’s self-portraits with her daughter that anticipate the intimate maternal studies by Cassatt (and Berthe Morisot). The English artist, John Hoppner, jealous of her success (and noting that her fee was three times Joshua Reynolds’), hated her. ‘Feeble and vulgar!’ But Reynolds (possibly her lover) disagreed. Her works were as good as any by painters living or dead. ‘Including Van Dyck?’ asked his student. ‘Yes,’ said Reynolds. Marie Antoinette was wrong, fatally, about many things but not about Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
