625. Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842),

French, Portrait of Princess Alexandra Golitsyna and

Her Son, 1794. Oil on canvas, 137 x 101 cm.

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Neoclassicism.

 

 

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

(1755 Paris – 1842 Paris)

 

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was her father’s student but she benefited from more advice from Gabriel Francois Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Joseph Vernet. In 1776 she married the famous painter and art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun. Before becoming a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1783, she became in 1779 the official court painter of Queen Marie-Antoinette. She made more than twenty-five portraits of her. At the beginning of the French Revolution she left France and lived in Austria and in Italy, where she was made a member of Academia di San Luca, and in Russia, where she was elected at Academy of Fine Arts of St. Petersburg. She travelled also in the Netherlands, England and Switzerland before going back to Paris. Her memoirs depict a very interesting, intimate and lively vision of her times as a woman artist working in a period dominated by the royal academies. She is seen as one of the most fluent portraitists of her era and as one of the most successful female artist of all time.