The story of art is a tale of artists achieving success not only because they understood how to work within certain rules but because they knew precisely when to break them. Take, for example, the smile: a seemingly innocuous gesture, a small movement of the lips that indicates pleasure – yet, in certain cities at certain moments in history, for a woman to depict herself smiling was considered nothing short of scandalous. Sometimes the smallest transgression can be the most radical.
Attitudes towards most things are, of course, cultural: the smile is no exception. In Italy during the Renaissance, women were depicted as virgins, saints or angels: beautiful, soulful and often inscrutable, but not much fun. There are a few exceptions – most obviously Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503), whose faint smile is more remote than happy, and numerous paintings by Caravaggio, but in the main, levity was only rarely represented. In seventeenth-century Holland, a love of both morality tales and jokes resulted in a robust trade in paintings of people drinking and laughing, but in France, smiling – and in particular a smile that revealed the teeth – was sternly frowned upon. Of course, this might have had something to do with the fact that King Louis XIV had no teeth left by the time he was forty and it wasn’t done to gloat. The king’s affliction was not rare – for most people, a smile was not a pretty thing. Until Dubois de Chémant’s invention of porcelain dentures in the late eighteenth century, false teeth – which were often made from animal bones, the most popular being hippopotamus jaws – were badly designed and often stank.
For a woman to paint a self-portrait smiling was not simply an expression of joy. It could also be read as something more subversive: a gesture that declared, as charmingly as possible, that she would not be told what to do, or how to behave, by anyone.
Around 1554, Sofonisba Anguissola sketched Young Woman Teaching an Old Woman to Read: it is assumed to be a self-portrait. With great vividness the young virtuosa gestures to the bespectacled woman next to her who gazes intently at a thin pamphlet, and tenderly grasps her hand. In an age that demanded decorum – elbows tucked into her side, her modesty and virtue fully on display – in this small drawing not only does Sofonisba depict herself with animated arms, but she breaks one of the era’s cardinal rules of representation: she is smiling broadly. In fact, she’s almost laughing. Even more extraordinarily for the time: we can see her teeth. It’s hard to imagine quite what a radical self-representation this was for the period. Throughout her life Sofonisba enjoyed teaching and this small drawing could be read as a testament to the joy it gave her.
We don’t know how many other artists were aware of Sofonisba’s transgression, but around ninety years after she created her wonderfully life-affirming self-portrait, an artist in Holland was to follow suit – and in so doing, she painted one of the best-loved self-portraits in art history.
The great Dutch artist Judith Leyster was baptised the eighth of nine children to Jan Willemsz Leyster and Trijn Jaspers in Haarlem on 28 July 1609. Unusually for women artists of the time, her father wasn’t involved in art: he was first a clothmaker and then a brewer. Details of Judith’s art training are lost, but she possibly studied with the portrait and history painter Frans Pietersz de Grebber in order to help her family after her father was bankrupted. Her earliest known paintings – Serenade and Jolly Topper, both of which depict men smiling broadly – are dated 1629 and signed with her distinctive monogram: Jl* – a play on her surname: ‘leidstar’ translates as lodestar – like the one that shone so brightly over Bethlehem – a star that guides.
In 1633, Judith became the only female member, alongside thirty men, of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke. This allowed her to sell her work on the open market, establish a workshop and take apprentices. In seventeenth-century Holland, Dutch painters delighted in portraying life in all its messy brilliance: people drinking, carousing, playing music, telling jokes and laughing. Many of these scenes have been interpreted as morality tales, but more often than not the joy lingers longer than the sermon. An early example is Gerrit van Honthorst’s Laughing Violinist of 1609 – a work in thrall to Caravaggio’s use of light and dark, but which, in its portrayal of the red-haired musician, crackles with mirth and vigour. Judith’s work was heavily influenced by the loose brushwork, realism and spontaneity of the leading artist of the day, Frans Hals, who was around thirty years her senior, and his younger brother, Dirck.
Holland was newly independent from Spain and its economy – and by association its art – was booming: by the early seventeenth century, painting was, for the first time, supported not just by the church and the state but by ordinary citizens. The demand for artworks was high – the walls of every shop, tavern and home were covered in them. Judith was quick to find work and was soon employing three male apprentices and took on male students. She was spirited: in October 1635 she sued Frans Hals when one of her apprentices left her workshop for his – a bold move for a young woman against an older, more powerful artist. (Somehow they both ended up getting fined.) Most of her paintings – which focus on a range of subjects but the best of which depict people smiling, laughing or playing games and music – are dated between 1629 and 1635.
In 1636, at the age of twenty-six, Judith married a local artist, Jan Miense Molenaer; they moved to Amsterdam, where there were better opportunities for selling their work. They had five children, only two of whom survived into adulthood; as well as running the household, Judith took over the management of her husband’s studio. She possibly continued to paint after her marriage but, as far as we know, she never again signed a work. If she was still painting, the results have been lost, destroyed or attributed to other artists. The only verified work by her from this period is a delicate watercolour of a red tulip from 1643.
Judith died in 1660, at the age of fifty. Although celebrated during her lifetime, she was largely forgotten after her death. Until 1893 her paintings were assumed to be by either Frans Hals or her husband; her rediscovery is thanks to the art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, who, in the late nineteenth century, recognised her monogram on the painting The Happy Couple from 1630, which had been attributed to Frans Hals. He eventually discovered seven works by her, six of which are signed with her monogram. Today there are around twenty works attributed to Judith Leyster. Surely there are many more, just waiting to be discovered.
Judith’s wonderfully vivid self-portrait of 1633 was possibly painted as a presentation piece for the Guild. She is young – only twenty-four – and smiling broadly. Her delight and pride in her craft is evident. Wielding eighteen brushes, she’s in the midst of painting a portrait of a smiling violinist and a young woman drinking wine – her own painting, Merry Company. Rather than her artist’s smock, she is dressed in her finest clothes – as if in sartorial celebration of her craft and the wealth it has afforded her. She turns to greet us, her pose an echo of Frans Hals’s Portrait of Isaak Abrahamsz. Massa from seven years earlier. It’s possible she also knew of Sofonisba Anguissola’s self-portraits, as they are mentioned in Karel van Manders’s Het Schilder-Boeck (Book of Painters), which had first been published in 1604, and which it’s likely Judith had read.
Although by 1926 it was commonly known that the painting was Judith Leyster’s self-portrait, it continued to be attributed to Frans Hals throughout the 1930s – possibly because of the drop in value that female authorship would inevitably entail. It wasn’t definitively attributed to Judith Leyster until the National Gallery of Art in Washington acquired it in 1949.
A century after Judith’s death, another artist was born whose smiling self-portraits – to our eyes, charming, inoffensive and skilful – created a furore. A seemingly innocent gesture – a woman expressing pleasure in herself and in her child – was nothing short of revolutionary.
One of the most renowned painters of the eighteenth century came from modest beginnings: she was born in Paris in 1755 to Jeanne Massin, a hairdresser, and Louis Vigée, a minor artist. Did Elisabeth Louise Vigée – later, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun – know of Sofonisba’s drawing or Judith’s paintings? It’s unlikely, given how quickly their fame dissipated, but Elisabeth would surely have approved of the ways in which they both thumbed their noses at convention.
Although France was in thrall to the Enlightenment – a time when writers and philosophers questioned the country’s traditional political and social foundations – women were still not legally considered to be the equal of men. Inroads had been made, however: any discussion around class, liberty, race (particularly in relation to slavery) and progress also inevitably touched on the role of gender. The century had seen a rise in female literacy – in main, thanks to the Catholic Church, which had increased the number of teaching orders – and middle-class girls were, for the first time, expected to read, write and be well versed in music and art. Despite their lack of rights, women could now keep up with current affairs, write letters and even maintain business records.
If the eighteenth century was a time of great debates, its radicalism was often blinkered: while one of the most famous philosophers of the time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, questioned the divine right of kings, class inequality and conventional education, he still believed in the subordination of women, writing to a friend that ‘women in general love no art, know nothing about any form of art, and have no genius’. However, in the other camp, the renowned aristocratic philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet advocated for a liberal economy, a constitutional government and equal rights to be granted to all people, irrespective of gender and race. In 1781 he published a pamphlet denouncing slavery and in 1790 his persuasive De l’admission des femmes au droit de cite (For the Admission to the Rights of Citizenship for Women) was circulated, in which he argued for political and social rights to be extended in the new Republic to include women. (He was to die in 1794 in mysterious circumstances – possibly murdered – in a cell during the French Revolution.) His wife, Sophie de Condorcet, ran one of the many intellectual salons that were popular in Paris before, during and after the Revolution, and which were often hosted by women. Remarkably, given her husband’s fame, Sophie survived the Terror; many of the dazzling women who attended her salon, such as the abolitionist, playwright and vocal activist for women’s rights, Olympe de Gouges, were to meet their death at the guillotine.
Like so many women who were to excel at art, Elisabeth was instructed in painting from an early age by her father, who died when she was twelve; otherwise, she was, in the main, self-taught. Her mother encouraged her precocious daughter’s talent and accompanied her to view private collections, where she copied works by her favourites – Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck. Banned from the life-drawing room, she spent hours making studies of plaster casts and statues in Paris’s museums and by the age of only fifteen had set herself up as a professional portrait painter. However, in 1774, when she was nineteen, her materials were confiscated by government authorities. They had caught wind of the young artist’s success; it was illegal to work as an artist without guild or academy membership – something that, as a woman, was very difficult to achieve. Not one to stumble at a hurdle, Elisabeth approached the Académie de Saint Luc and persuaded the powers that be to let her join – which they did. The academy had been founded in 1730 and was popular among young artists who weren’t yet accepted into the country’s most prestigious institution, the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture).
Paris’s Royal Academy was arguably the most prestigious art institution in Europe and in 1706 it had voted not to admit women to its ranks. Eventually, rules were amended to allow no more than four women members at any one time, an arbitrary number that sorely restricted the possibilities for females to become professional artists. If an artist was successful in their application to this hallowed institution, it meant an immediate improvement of their circumstances. The prestige of being an academician meant more commissions – often royal and aristocratic – and the right to exhibit work in the twice-yearly Salon du Louvre. In 1777, however, the institution had been alarmed by the rise in the influence of the new Académie de Saint Luc and its power was such that it had the younger academy closed. Elisabeth was now adrift without the professional validity that membership endowed. Anxious about her financial situation and encouraged by her mother, the young artist reluctantly married an art dealer, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun. She recalls her reservations about matrimony in the memoir she published in her old age: ‘So little, however, did I feel inclined to sacrifice my liberty that, even on my way to church, I kept saying to myself, “Shall I say yes, or shall I say no?” Alas! I said yes, and in so doing exchanged present troubles for others…’
The union was, unsurprisingly, not a success and her husband’s promised riches never transpired; rather, he kept gambling – and losing – his wife’s earnings. Yet she didn’t let this affect her ambition. Her salons at her home in the Hôtel de Lubert, where she entertained artists and intellectuals, were famous and Elisabeth became a close friend of Marie Antoinette; they were the same age. In 1778 the young artist was commissioned, for the first time, to paint the queen’s portrait – an extraordinary state of affairs, considering her lack of academy membership.
In 1780, Elisabeth gave birth to her only child, Jeanne Julie Louise (who became known as Julie). Pregnancy hadn’t hindered the artist’s ferocious work ethic. She later remembered that: ‘The day my daughter was born, I was still in the studio, trying to work on my Venus Binding the Wings of Cupid in the intervals between labour pains.’
By all accounts, Elisabeth was a canny businesswoman and an instinctive diplomat; as a remarkable beauty, she also had a great talent for holding an audience captivated. But she was also obsessed with art history, challenging herself to not only match but exceed the accomplishments of the earliest artists. In 1782, at the age of twenty-seven, she painted Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat. It’s an audacious picture – the young artist’s homage (and, in many ways, challenge) to Peter Paul Rubens’s 1622 painting of Susanna Lunden, Chapeau de Paille (Straw Hat), which Elisabeth had seen on her travels in Brussels. Whereas the woman in Rubens’s painting looks out at us coyly, her arms crossed against her chest, Elisabeth’s self-portrait is infectiously joyful. Framed by a limitless blue sky, the artist’s shimmering rose-coloured silk dress, white lace, black shawl, loose hair – a style she was apparently responsible for introducing to the French court – and relatively unadorned naturalism display her interest in fashion. As with most self-portraits by women of the time, she depicts herself in clothes she would unlikely to have worn while painting. The reality would have been far more casual: in her memoirs she describes how once she sat on her palette without noticing the mess on her dress. She holds out her right hand in something of an invitation. Her cheeks are flushed and her face is animated with a light smile that exhibits an unabashed delight at her chosen profession. She holds a large palette – thick blobs of paint at the ready – in the crook of her left arm, along with a fistful of brushes. The painting is something of an in-joke: despite the title of Rubens’s painting, Susanna Lunden’s hat appears to be beaver felt, not straw, the result perhaps of a misspelling: the French for straw is paille and for hair is poil. In her self-portrait Elisabeth has corrected Rubens’s mistake: a luxurious straw hat, decorated with flowers and a large feather, adorns her golden curls.
Displayed in the Salon of 1783, one critic wrote approvingly of Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat:
Mme Le Brun – is she not astonishing?… the works of the modern Minerva are the first to attract the eyes of the spectator, call him back repeatedly, take hold of him, possess him, elicit from him exclamations of pleasure and admiration… the paintings in question are also the most highly praised, talked about topics of conversation in Paris.
But the self-portrait wasn’t simply a charming image of a young woman in full bloom: it was a canny business move. In her memoirs Elisabeth is quite frank about her motives:
I painted myself with a straw hat on my head, a feather, and a garland of wildflowers, holding my palette in my hand. And when the portrait was exhibited at the Salon I feel free to confess that it added considerably to my reputation. The celebrated Müller made an engraving after it, but it must be understood that the dark shadows of an engraving spoiled the whole effect of such a picture. Soon after my return from Flanders, the portrait I had mentioned, and several other works of mine, were the cause of Joseph Vernet’s decision to propose me as a member of the Royal Academy of Painting.
In 1783, by decree of the king – most likely at the urging of Marie Antoinette – Elisabeth was accepted into the Royal Academy. Even despite regal patronage, however, it hadn’t been easy. The fact of her gender wasn’t the only hindrance: she was married to an art dealer and members were forbidden to have close contact with the commercial art world. It seems clear that the king overruled these prohibitions, a fact that must have irritated some of her fellow artists. In Elisabeth’s memoirs, despite the decades that had passed, the memory of her colleagues’ opposition still rankles, although, somewhat disingenuously, the artist doesn’t mention the king’s assistance. She writes that:
M. Pierre, then first Painter to the King, made strong opposition, not wishing, he said, that women should be admitted, although Mme. Vallayer-Coster, who painted flowers beautifully, had already been admitted, and I think Mme. Vien had been, too. M. Pierre, a very mediocre painter, was a clever man. Besides, he was rich, and this enabled him to entertain artists luxuriously. Artists were not so well off in those days as they are now. His opposition might have become fatal to me if all true picture-lovers had not been associated with the Academy, and if they had not formed a cabal, in my favour, against M. Pierre’s. At last I was admitted and presented my picture Peace Bringing Back Plenty.
Elisabeth was admitted on 31 May 1783, the same day as her chief rival, the miniaturist and portrait painter, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. They became immediate celebrities. (Adélaïde, who was six years Elisabeth’s senior, was the first woman to be granted permission to establish a studio for herself and her students at the Louvre. Her Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Marie Gabrielle Capet [1761–1818] and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond [died 1788] of 1785 is rightly considered one of the most famous paintings of the time.) Between 1648 and 1793 – some 145 years – the two artists were among only fifteen women to be granted full membership.
Marie Antoinette was Elisabeth’s vocal champion and she commissioned her to paint more than thirty portraits of herself and her family: images that, despite the inevitable pomp, display the family with a rare humanity and personality. The two women were close: in fact, Elisabeth’s Marie Antoinette en chemise, which was shown at the Academy in 1783, was considered so intimate as to be scandalous. The young artist had painted her queen in a loose cotton dress that would normally only be worn in the privacy of her chamber; she is shown with a wide straw hat, no jewels and a bunch of roses. (Marie Antoinette’s favourite dressmaker, Rose Bertin, who she light-heartedly appointed the court’s ‘Minister of Fashion’, had also encouraged the queen to wear looser, more informal clothes.) To contemporary eyes, with its full sleeves, lace ruffles and gold ribbon at the waist, the dress looks elaborate, extravagant even. But in eighteenth-century Paris, the queen might as well have been posing in her underwear and, after an outcry, the portrait was removed from public scrutiny. But the story did not end there. While the painting was considered outrageous, it also prompted a craze: women who were accustomed to wearing tightly corseted dresses were charmed by the garment’s fresh appeal and the sense of freedom it heralded. This outrageous new fashion became known as chemise à la reine but its impact was much darker than its airy appearance might suggest. Silk was the fabric worn by aristocrats: cotton was considered a working-class, English material as, at the time, it was mainly supplied by the British-owned East India Company. Unwittingly, Elisabeth not only had depicted her queen in both a louche and an unpatriotic light but had also boosted the slave trade as demand for cotton increased.
To be a court painter in pre-Revolutionary France required focusing your talents on representing the king and queen in the best possible light. It was a tough job, as the king was very much out of touch with the suffering of his people. Supported by a majority of the nobility, Marie Antoinette’s famously indecisive husband, Louis XVI, had resisted any real attempts to reform the government and to address the dire economic state of the country; this was the combined result of supporting America’s war of independence from King George III – which, ironically, would help inspire the French Revolution – and the starvation and unemployment brought about by the coldest winter on record, when even the River Seine froze over. Some 98 per cent of the tax-paying population had no say as to how the country was governed, yet the financial burden of the country fell on the ‘third estate’ – the middle classes and the peasants. That the king often avoided the problems of the day by indulging his passion for hunting and, oddly, locksmithing, didn’t help endear him to the people. Vile rumours, circulated by her enemies, swirled around Marie Antoinette. She was nicknamed ‘Madame Deficit’ and anonymous pamphlets distributed throughout Paris depicted her as a nymphomaniac and a lesbian who used a dildo to pleasure herself. As an Austrian, she was also viewed disparagingly as a foreigner.
To help counter the queen’s plummeting reputation, in 1787 Elisabeth was commissioned by the Bâtiments du Roi – a division of the king’s household – to paint a portrait that would show her as a model of motherly decorum. The result was Marie Antoinette and her Children – at almost three metres tall and two metres wide, the largest painting Elisabeth ever made. The young queen is demurely dressed in a sable-lined, red velvet gown, designed by Rose Bertin. She tenderly holds her baby son, Louis-Charles, on her knee; her nine-year-old daughter, Marie-Thérèse, clings to her mother’s arm and looks at her adoringly. While Marie Antoinette wanted the portrait to project an image of herself that was both demure and maternal, she couldn’t help herself (nor I suspect could Elisabeth): her lush, feathered hat is characteristically enormous and, posed in the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles, she is pictured very much as a woman who takes wealth and privilege for granted. Louis Joseph, the king’s heir, is seven years old; he points to the empty cradle that once held a baby girl, Sophie, who died during the painting’s creation before her first birthday. Louis Joseph was to die two years after the painting was completed, most probably from tuberculosis. Louis-Charles died at the age of ten after being tortured and held in solitary confinement in Paris by the brutal revolutionary guard. Marie Antoinette, of course, was beheaded in 1793, ten months after her husband. Marie-Thérèse was the only family member to survive: she fled prison for Vienna at midnight on 19 December 1795, her seventeenth birthday, the result of a prisoner swap that had secretly been arranged between Austria, the home of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (and her mother’s birthplace), and the so-called Directory that was ruling France after the Terror.I
As a work of propaganda, Elisabeth’s portrait was a failure: it was too little, too late. As a work of art, it’s now one of France’s most famous paintings and one of the most important – and popular – portraits in the collection at Versailles.
Despite her phenomenal talent, Elisabeth’s gender and her role as the queen’s favourite often worked against her. In her memoir she wrote that: ‘I was made the butt of calumnies of the most odious description.’ A familiar theme in the story of women artists – or women in general – is that men, as if incapable of believing in their talent, accuse them of having ‘loose morals’ or of being impostors. One writer in the journal Mémoires secrètes stated that Elisabeth ‘does not paint her own pictures, that she does not finish them at least, and that an artist who is in love with her (M. Ménageot) assists her’. Artistic brilliance has often been paired with licentious behaviour and rumours flew about Elisabeth’s private life: cruel stories were published in newspapers that she had affairs with numerous men, including M. Colonne, the finance minister, whose portrait she had exhibited in the 1785 Salon; Charles Alexandre, Vicomte de Calonne, the Comte de Vaudreuil and the painter François Ménageot.
Yet, despite the constant slurs she was facing, in 1787 the young artist once again decided to shock the public: she painted a self-portrait cradling her young daughter, Julie (she was to paint another one in 1789). To our eyes, the painting is ostensibly a fairly straightforward, charming study of a mother’s love, but in eighteenth-century France the fact that Elisabeth depicts herself smiling – and that you can see five of her teeth – was an affront to convention. A critic in Mémoires secrètes (which seemed to have it in for her) wrote that Elisabeth’s smile was ‘an affectation which artists, connoisseurs and people of good taste are unanimous in condemning’. Gravity and reserve were qualities to be lauded: a display of teeth and a hint of joy or hilarity suggested the subject was ‘plebeian, insane (or at least not in rational control) or else in the grip of some particularly powerful passion’. We can be sure, though, that Elisabeth knew exactly what she was doing – and was more than aware of how very lovely she looked, teeth and all. The public might be scandalised, but it was a gamble she was willing to take, not only as an artist exulting in her skill, but for the sake of her bank balance. Even today it is often the case that the more notorious the artist, the stronger the sales.
The year 1789 saw the beginning of the French Revolution, a time of brutal upheaval, bloodshed and political reform that was to embroil the country for ten years. It was a dangerous time for an artist so closely associated with the royal family. Elisabeth recalled that:
The fearful year 1789 was well advanced, and all decent people were already seized with terror […] I had little need to learn fresh details in order to foresee what horrors impended. I knew beyond doubt that my house in the Rue Gros Chenet, where I had settled but three months since, had been singled out by the criminals. They threw sulphur into our cellars through the airholes. If I happened to be at my window, vulgar ruffians would shake their fists at me. Numberless sinister rumours reached me from every side; in fact, I now lived in a state of continual anxiety and sadness. […] But I must acknowledge that even with the furthest stretch of my imagination I guessed only at a fraction of the crimes that were to be committed.
On the night of 5 October that year the royal family was visited by a howling mob and forcibly escorted from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris to be held under house arrest. Elisabeth had her citizenship revoked; as the queen’s favourite, she was understandably terrified. At the time, no one was allowed to leave France, except ‘those who can prove they have devoted themselves to the study of the sciences, arts and trades […] and who are absent only for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge in their profession’. With great foresight of the horrors to come, Elisabeth fled to Italy with her daughter and a governess. Her husband was later called before the Revolutionary authorities to explain her absence and, covering for her, said that: ‘On account of her love for her art, she left for Italy in the month of October 1789. She went to instruct and to improve herself.’ They didn’t fall for it but there was nothing they could do now that she was out of the country. Although she had saved her life, and that of her daughter, her situation was desperate. Despite having earned, in her estimation, more than a million francs, Elisabeth recorded that she left Paris with less than twenty francs: her husband had gambled her fortune away. So, what did she decide to do?
Paint a very cheerful self-portrait at the easel.
Elisabeth recalls that: ‘I painted myself palette in hand before a canvas on which I was tracing a figure of the Queen in white crayon.’ She turns to face us, her expression open and friendly; a light smile plays on her lips. The fact that her mouth is open and we can see her teeth was a reiteration of her scandalous self-portrait of 1787. Elisabeth was, of course, all too aware of her reputation and happy to exploit it – she needed, more than ever, for her work to be talked about in order to attract patrons and commissions. She looks beautiful, youthful and fresh; much younger, in fact, than her thirty-five years. Her costume is both simple and festive; decorated with a ruffled lace collar, a jaunty white ribbon fails to control her curls, and her wrists are adorned with yet more delicate white lace. It’s no coincidence that she’s wearing white – the colour of the Bourbon dynasty. Although her black dress is modest, austere even, an exuberant scarlet sash adds to the overall impression of playfulness; she recalls, in fact, the theatrical Pierrot clown figures so popular in Rococo painting before the Revolution banished that kind of fun. She holds a palette and a bunch of about ten brushes in her left hand. In a brownish, nondescript room her face glows like a beacon of light in a gloomy world. The brush in her right hand touches the surface of the picture; she is painting a portrait of Marie Antoinette. This might initially seem a curious choice of subject, given the turmoil in France – although no one could anticipate the scale of violence the Revolution would unleash and at the time the execution of the king and queen would have been unthinkable. But most importantly, Elisabeth was well aware that the Grand Duke of Tuscany was Marie Antoinette’s brother.
Elisabeth had painted the picture in Rome after visiting the famous Corridoio Vasariano – the Vasari Corridor – at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The kilometre-long passageway had been designed by Vasari in 1564 to allow Cosimo de’ Medici and other Florentine noblemen and women to walk safely through the city, across the river from the Palazzo Vecchio to their home, Palazzo Pitti. In 1664, Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici had initiated a collection of self-portraits to line the route; the tradition continues to this day and the collection now numbers almost 2,000 works. Although the building was designed to be government offices (hence, Uffizi), since the sixteenth century its extraordinary collection of paintings could be visited by appointment and, in 1765, had opened to the public; it formally became a museum in 1865.
Most of the self-portraits in the Uffizi corridor had been commissioned; Elisabeth, however, painted her self-portrait off her own bat, in order to gift it to the Grand Duke. This wasn’t a simple act of generosity: Elisabeth was a genius at self-promotion and her painting – which was larger than many of the other self-portraits – had the desired effect: her smile was a hit, and the painting was happily accepted into the collection. She wrote in a letter of 16 March 1790 that: ‘My painting for Florence enjoys the greatest success […] never in my life have I been encouraged this much. […] They call me Madame Van Dyck, Madame Rubens.’
Surprisingly, however, Elisabeth’s contribution as a female artist was not particularly unusual for the collection: the Uffizi houses a higher concentration of work by women than any other historic gallery. We can thank, in part, Cosimo de’ Medici’s art advisor Filippo Baldinucci for setting a precedent. In 1681 he wrote to his employer: ‘I would recommend, if possible, not to miss the chance to include in the collection some celebrated female painters, such as Sofonisba Angosciola [sic] from Cremona, her sister Europa Angosciola, her other sister Lucia, Elisbetta Sirani from Bologna [and] Artemisia Lomi, who worked in Florence and Rome.’
As well as the artists mentioned, the gallery also includes self-portraits by seventeenth-century artists such as Lavinia Fontana, Arcangela Paladini and Marietta Robusti; and, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, works by Mary Benwell, Rosa Bonheur, Rosalba Carriera, Angelica Kauffmann and others.
For Elisabeth it was the beginning of an illustrious twelve years in exile. She was accepted into the Accademia di Parma and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome; an inveterate traveller, she also worked in Florence, Naples, Vienna, St Petersburg and Berlin, supporting herself and her daughter by painting literally hundreds of portraits of the wealthy and famous along the way. She was distressed, however, when, in 1799, Julie, who had herself become an artist, married Gaëtan-Bernard Nigris, secretary to the director of the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg. Elisabeth wrote in her memoir that: ‘The whole charm of my life seemed to be irretrievably destroyed. I even felt no joy in loving my daughter, though God knows how much I still did love her, in spite of all her wrongdoing.’ Without talent or fortune, Elisabeth was not only unimpressed by Nigris, but was convinced that a plot was afoot, in which Julie and Nigris were involved, to turn public opinion against her. (The details are hazy.) Whatever the truth of the matter, the marriage didn’t last. Julie died in poverty at the age of thirty-nine, estranged from her wealthy mother. None of her paintings have survived.
In 1801, her French citizenship restored and her name removed from a list of counter-revolutionary emigrés, Elisabeth returned to Paris. So many of the people whose portraits she had painted had been executed. She wrote:
I will not attempt to describe my feelings at setting foot on the soil of France, from which I had been absent 12 years. I was stirred by terror, grief and joy in turn. I mourned the friends who had died on the scaffold; but I was to see those again who still lived. This France, that I was entering once more, had been the scene of horrible crimes. But this France was my country!
Ironically, her membership of the Academy had expired as female academicians were abolished altogether by the French Revolution. You might have assumed that after so much travel, she would want to stay put, but no – she was still restless. In 1802, Elisabeth travelled to London for the first time, where she stayed for three years and painted, among other portraits, the future King George IV.
After eventually returning to France and travelling intermittently to Switzerland, she settled in the countryside, at Louveciennes. In her eighties, Elisabeth wrote her three-volume autobiography, Souvenirs de ma vie (Memories of my Life, 1835–7), apparently heeding the advice of a friend who told her that ‘if you do not do it yourself, it will be done for you, and God knows what will be written!’ It became a bestseller. Looking back at the beginning of her career, in the first volume she declares:
I mention these facts to show what an inborn passion for the art I possessed. Nor has that passion ever diminished; it seems to me that it has even gone on growing with time, for today I feel under the spell of it as much as ever, and shall, I hope, until the hour of death. It is, indeed, to this divine passion that I owe, not only my fortune, but my felicity, because it has always been the means of bringing me together with the most delightful and most distinguished men and women in Europe. The recollection of all the notable people I have known often cheers me in times of solitude.
Elisabeth died in 1842 at the age of eighty-seven and was buried in the cemetery at Louveciennes. She left behind 660 portraits, around 40 self-portraits and 200 landscape paintings. Her tombstone epitaph – which she apparently wrote – declares, aptly: Ici, enfin, je repose. (Here, at last, I rest.)
Despite her fame and virtuosity, the first major retrospective devoted to Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun in France was staged at Paris’s Grand Palais in 2015. When I visited the exhibition – room after room after room of brilliantly skilful paintings – I remembered the lectures I had attended on French art history. We were taught about the pre-Revolution Rococo artists – in particular Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard – whose charmingly playful paintings depicting the amorous machinations of the aristocracy were superseded by the chilly heroics of neoclassical painters such as Jacques-Louis David. I could not recall one mention of a woman artist. Walking through the galleries of the Grand Palais, gazing at the sheer range of Elisabeth’s self-portraits was profoundly revealing: again and again, she scrutinised herself, not only as a woman but as an artist in conversation with art history. And yet, despite her talent, fame, prolific output and international success, it still wasn’t enough for her to be included in the history books. How many more times should she have portrayed herself before she was permitted to enter the canon? What else should she have done?