PAINTER FRANCEI know nothing about painting; but I have grown to love it through you.
—KING LOUIS XVI, PRAISING ELISABETH’S PORTRAIT OF HIS WIFE, MARIE ANTOINETTE
As the theater darkened, Elisabeth had a moment to look at the audience members around her. She was surrounded by beautiful men and women, dressed in the most sumptuous fabrics, wearing extravagant powdered wigs and sparkling jewels. And among them, there she was, a teenager who had to earn her own living from her paintings! The curtain opened, and she turned her attention to the stage where a young woman was standing before an easel, paintbrushes and palette in hand. Her subject was a beautiful woman wearing a plain muslin dress and a straw hat.
Wait . . . where had she seen this before? To her surprise and delight, Elisabeth realized the actors were playing out a scene from her own life—Elisabeth painting the queen, Marie Antoinette! In the portrait, she had tried to show the queen in a more natural way, instead of her usual elaborate wigs and white face powder, with the result that many people criticized her for painting the queen in her underwear! Not this crowd, thankfully. Elisabeth held back her tears as the entire audience stood up and applauded her. She had never felt so much emotion and pride in her entire life.
Elisabeth’s most famous portrait of Marie Antoinette was so criticized for the high fee paid to the artist that the royal family had to turn the painting so it faced the wall in the Louvre museum in Paris. It remained that way until after the French Revolution, when it was turned back around.
Imagine, at fifteen you are such a talented artist that the kings and queens and presidents of the world are begging you to paint them! Elisabeth is still considered one of the most talented and successful portrait painters ever, artist to the richest, most famous Europeans of her time, but Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun rose from very humble beginnings. She was born in Paris to a middle-class family. Her father was a moderately successful painter and often let his daughter play with his paints and brushes.
From age six to eleven Elisabeth lived in a convent, where she first showed her artistic talents. In her memoirs, she wrote:
During this time I was always sketching, covering every available surface with my drawings; my exercise books . . . had their margins crammed with tiny drawings of heads and profiles. I traced figures . . . on the dormitory walls in charcoal; and as you may well suppose, I was often punished.5
After she’d returned home for a year, Elisabeth’s beloved father died from swallowing a fish bone. He left the family very little money to live on, so Elisabeth began charging for her paintings. Although she was virtually self-taught, she had such remarkable talent that by age fifteen, she supported her entire family on her wages.
Her reputation spread quickly, and soon the talented teenager was in constant demand to paint the French aristocracy. Meanwhile, Elisabeth’s mother remarried a wealthy jeweler. Elisabeth hated the man, who wore her father’s clothes, had a terrible temper, and forced her to turn over all her earnings to him. To escape, she rushed into marriage with art collector Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, even though her friends warned her, “You would do better to tie a stone around your neck and throw yourself in the river.” But she was desperate.
Sadly, her friends were right. Her husband earned no money and forced Elisabeth to give her ample wages to him, which he spent on women, booze, and gambling. Elisabeth was miserable.
My only real happiness has been through painting.
—ELISABETH VIGÉE-LE BRUN
Fortunately, her art gave her great happiness. In 1778, at twenty-three, Elisabeth was such a celebrity that Marie Antoinette insisted she become an official court painter. Elisabeth wrote of this queen: “I was very much in awe of Her Majesty’s imposing air; but she spoke to me in such a kindly fashion that her warm sympathy soon dissolved any such impression.”6 The court appointment turned Elisabeth into the most popular portrait painter. She was sought after by royal families and the most influential leaders of her time, and she earned incredible fees.
For the first time, queens and princesses allowed themselves to be painted in costumes that hid their high social rank. She even set new fashion standards by encouraging her subjects to stop powdering their hair and go natural. The women were delighted to be seen as beautiful. Elisabeth had a talent to see the inner beauty of even the most unattractive person.
Elisabeth never finished her final portrait of Catherine the Great. Halfway through her sittings, the queen was murdered by her own son, Paul.
But, as time went on, the decadent royal family became less and less popular. So did Elisabeth. Lies were spread about her: that she charged extravagant fees for her paintings, she threw unbelievably lavish parties, she was having an affair with the minister of finance. Worst of all, Elisabeth’s enemies claimed her portraits weren’t really hers but were painted by a man!
In 1789 when the French Revolution swept through the country, killing Marie Antoinette, much of the royal family, and their friends, Elisabeth was horrified. She knew that she could be next because of her ties to the queen, so she and her daughter escaped to Italy. They wouldn’t see France again for twelve years.
During her exile, Elisabeth traveled all over Europe—Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Switzerland, England, and Russia. She supported herself and her daughter by painting the royal families and important figures of each country they visited, including another infamous queen, Russia’s Catherine the Great.
While traveling, Elisabeth finally broke up with her husband for good. Her letter to him from Moscow shows what an unusual, independent spirit she had:
What would I have done without my work? If I had been ill, you would have let me starve; since instead of saving money you have spent it on women who deceived you, you have gambled and lost Monsieur . . . I will neither let my fortune fall into the hands of strangers, since it has been too hard to earn . . . nor will I take advice from anyone.7
At a time when few women supported themselves, Elisabeth chose to be a single mother, earn her own way, and travel the world.
In 1802, after 255 artists petitioned for Elisabeth’s return, she was allowed back into France. She continued to paint well into her old age, and in the 1830s, she published her memoirs, which were very popular. In her seventies, she praised her life’s work: “This love [of painting] has never diminished. . . . [I] hope that its power will only cease with my life.”
Perhaps her art gave her strength and energy as well—she lived to the ripe old age of eighty-seven! During her lifetime she painted over nine hundred paintings, which hang in such prestigious museums as the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Uffizi Gallery in Italy, and the National Gallery in London. She is ranked beside such great masters as Raphael and Caravaggio, and was an inspiration to female painters and independent women almost two hundred years before the term feminist was coined.