Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (French, 1755-1842)

Born into an established middle-class Parisian family in 1755, Elisabeth Louise Vigée‑Lebrun first took drawing lessons from her father, Louis Vigée, a reputable pastelist and member of the Académie de Saint-Luc (the prominent painter’s guild in Paris). Showing real potential from a young age, she had access to her father’s studio where she learned to draw and paint from artists including Pierre Davesne and Gabriel François Doyen. Following the death of her father in 1767, she helped support her family by becoming a professional portraitist. Vigée‑Lebrun joined the Académie de Saint-Luc in 1774 at the age of 19 and two years later married the art dealer Jean-Baptiste Pierre Lebrun.

Vigée‑Lebrun first painted Queen Marie Antoinette in 1778. Her ability to portray her sitters in a favorable, attractive way gained her the queen’s approval, and she became her official portrait painter, eventually painting her thirty times. In 1783, Vigée-Lebrun applied for membership at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture as a history painter. The Comte d’Angiviller—a powerful minister to King Louis XVI and Director of the King’s Buildings—attempted to block her admission, citing her husband’s status as an art dealer as the primary reason (members were not allowed to associate with commercial endeavors outside of the Academy). Despite the Comte's efforts, Vigée-Lebrun was accepted as member to the Academy in 1783 after the king and queen interceded on her behalf. Although she had tried to be admitted as a history painter, Vigée‑Lebrun was received as a portraitist on the same day as fellow portrait painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. After their acceptance, members of the Academy managed to obtain the King’s official commitment to limit the number of female academy members to four, the number on the roster at that time.

In 1785, with the public’s increasing frustration with the extravagancy of the monarchy, Vigée‑Lebrun was commissioned to paint Marie-Antoinette and Her Children (Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon) to present the queen as an affectionate and respectable mother. The political tension did not cease, causing Vigée‑Lebrun and her daughter to flee France at the outbreak of the French Revolution due to her association with the monarchy. Spending twelve years in exile, Vigée‑Lebrun traveled throughout the courts of Europe where she painted portraits of aristocrats and wealthy patrons and received honorary admissions to art academies as well as awards. She was awarded membership to the Academy of Fine Arts in Parma in 1789 and the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome in 1790 during her exile in Italy, and was elected an honorary free associate of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg in 1800. When her exile status was abolished under Napoleon’s rule, Vigée‑Lebrun moved back to France. She continued to paint and published a memoir before dying in 1842 at the age of 86.

Kelsey Martin and Nicole Myers, DMA exhibition text Women Artists in Europe from the Monarchy to Modernism, 2018.

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