Culture | Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun at the Metropolitan Museum

Woman of the world

An overdue tribute to an exceptional painter

The look of love
|NEW YORK

SOME artists never live to enjoy acclaim. Vincent Van Gogh died in obscurity, having sold only one painting. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, a French portraitist working in the decades before and after the French revolution, had the opposite problem. For much of her life she was celebrated and sought out by the rich around Europe; she charged such high fees that few could afford her. Her contemporary, Jacques-Louis David, praised one of her paintings as better than his own. However, after her death in 1842 at the age of 86, she began to be overlooked. Only one previous show in America, at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth in 1982, has paid tribute to her evocative, graceful artistry.

Vigée Le Brun is now being given her due. A new show of her work has travelled from the Grand Palais in Paris to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and will make its final stop at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The exhibition offers two parallel narratives. One is the evolution of Vigée Le Brun’s stellar career, which was launched after she began painting France’s queen, Marie Antoinette, when they were both 23. The other is the turmoil of French politics, which changed dramatically over the course of the artist’s long life. The revolution of 1789 caused an exodus among the country’s nobility. Vigée Le Brun painted a few of them when they were in exile abroad. Her paintings, imbued with lightness and luxury before the revolution, took on a subtly sober tone in the years afterwards.

Rarely is one afforded such an intimate view into the life of the rich in pre-revolutionary France, but Vigée Le Brun’s luscious paintings suggest how good the living was. She became expert at rendering fur, silk, ribbons and lace. The daughter of a hairdresser and a minor portraitist, Vigée Le Brun received no formal art training, but her innate talent helped her stand out early on, as did the support of the queen, who intervened on her behalf to make sure she would be accepted to the exclusive Royal Academy. Membership was capped at four women at a time; in its 150 years, just 15 women were admitted to the Academy, compared with 550 men.

A life-size portrait of Marie Antoinette is on loan from Versailles, the first time it has travelled outside France. Although Vigée Le Brun made her name painting the queen, these stately works can feel more stiff than her others. A better picture is of Charles Alexandre de Calonne, the finance minister, who sits on a red chair, holding a letter marked “for the king”. The exhibition suggests how small the world of the French ruling class was during this period. Calonne’s portrait is placed next to one of the Countess du Barry de Cérès, his lover.

When the revolution broke out, Vigée Le Brun worried that her relations with the monarchy would put her in danger and sought refuge in Italy. Leaving was an astute choice. One of her contemporaries, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, stayed in France but received few commissions and had one of her best paintings destroyed. “Most artists lost a decade of work that they could have done because of the revolution,” says Katharine Baetjer, a curator at the Met. However, Vigée Le Brun remade her career several times while abroad, painting the nobility in Italy, Austria and the Russian empire. She was beautiful, socially gifted and an astute businesswoman. Few artists had such a global career and managed to overcome the sexism that hampered women’s artistic rise.

Seeing Vigée Le Brun’s work assembled, it is clear that her early work was her best. She is gifted at painting children, including her daughter, Julie (pictured), to whom she was very close until their relationship shattered in adulthood. Her Russian paintings lack the subtle, introspective humanity of her portraits in France and Italy; many boast dramatic landscape backdrops and mythological elements. The most interesting work of her later years is a self-portrait, shorn of the frills and beauty of her youth. The contrast between it and an earlier, ebullient self-portrait she painted in 1790 for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence is striking. She had thought then that she might soon return to France, but it would be 12 years before she did.

In all, Vigée Le Brun produced more than 600 paintings. The Met has about 80 on display; it is half the size of the show at the Grand Palais. This is partly because there are no pictures in the exhibition from Russian museums as a result of a long-standing legal dispute that has raised fears that any loans to America may be seized. But the Met also felt that a new and perhaps untutored audience would have the patience only for a smaller, more tailored show. Those seeing Vigée Le Brun’s work for the first time will be impressed by her skill and sensibility and wonder why they have not met her sooner.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Woman of the world"

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