GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Born into an artistic family, Elisabeth Louise Vigée‑Lebrun took drawing lessons from her father and began working as a professional artist as a teenager. She became Queen Marie Antoinette’s official portrait painter, and in 1783 she was admitted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Forced into exile at the onset of the French Revolution, Vigée‑Lebrun continued to be a sought after portraitist. While living in Russia, she painted this striking portrait of Natalia Zakharovna Kolycheva, a member of the nobility. Vigée‑Lebrun presented her sitter as a refined and educated woman: she reads a French play and wears fashionable clothing, gold jewelry, and a classicizing hair accessory. Vigée-Lebrun was both celebrated and criticized for idealizing her sitters through the supple brushwork, rich hues, and soft lighting so skillfully demonstrated here.
Excerpt from
Kelsey Martin and Nicole Myers, DMA exhibition text Women Artists in Europe from the Monarchy to Modernism, 2018.
NOTES
Checked Piction
former number according to education doc- T43007.33
Other work by Vigee Lebrun in Collection- https://www.dma.org/object/artwork/4305928/- This painting is in an object package I made for Dealey works with commemorative books in archives.
In 1776 the beautiful and talented Elisabeth married the painter and art dealer Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun. From then on, the artist hyphenated her last name to Vigée-Lebrun. Unfortunately, it was her marriage to an art dealer that prevented her admission to the prestigious Royal Academy, which, in principle, frowned upon the sullying of an artist's stature through direct affiliation with the commercial art world. However, through the intervention of her influential patron, Marie Antoinette, Vigee-Lebrun was admitted to the Academy in 1783. From then on, she enjoyed a steady stream of high-profile commissions and exhibited regularly at the Salon to great critical acclaim. Her private parties at the Hotel Le Brun were legendary for their novelty, and the best of Parisian society could be found at her table.
It was with great dismay, then, that Vigee-Lebrun had to witness the events leading up to the fall of the ancien regime in 1789. A lifelong monarchist, Vigee-Lebrun fled Paris in 1789, after having been falsely accused of having an adulterous affair with the exiled Finance Minister Calonne. Over the next sixteen years, Madame Lebrun took refuge, first in Italy, then in Russia, where her artistic reputation as the portraitist of the queen put her in great demand with the aristocracy wherever she went. Her travels throughout Italy allowed her to study the Great Tradition firsthand, thereby deepening the sophistication of her art. However, the greatest influence on Vigee-Lebrun's art was the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, whose art she encountered when she toured Flanders and Holland with her husband in 1781.
Although Vigee-Lebrun was to return to France at last in 1805, her art had long fallen out of fashion in Paris. But, by then, she had amassed a small fortune as the itinerant portraitist of the European elite and was able to live out the rest of her days in relative ease. The first volume of her famous Souvenirs, chronicling her glamorous life as the favorite of Marie Antoinette and her travails after the fall of the ancien régime, was published in 1835. It remains an enduring portrait of the period, as witnessed by one of the most remarkable women painters of the 18th century.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 3
With a dynamic twist ofher body and lively expression, Madame Kolychova appears as though interrupted in her reading. This is the type of animated, polished, and supremely attractive portrait ofEuropean royalty and aristocracy that made Marie Louise Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun the most successful society painter ofthe eighteenth-century.
From- didactic and label copy in education files, no date or author.
VIGEE LEBRUN-
The last picture that Mr. Rosenberg bought was Portrait of Natalia Nakharovna Kolychova, née Hitrova (see fig. 108, p. 153), painted by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun in Saint Petersburg. Vigée Le Brun was a great portrait painter, who, like Vallayer-Coster, achieved success in a field that was dominated by men. Vigée Le Brun strongly admired Jean-Baptiste Greuze, was a pupil of Vernet, and also loved the sensuous quality of Rubens’s painting. She worked for the aristocracy and royal family—particularly for Marie Antoinette. At the time of the French Revolution, she traveled widely in Europe but ended up in Saint Petersburg at the Russian court, where she continued painting in this very luscious, sensuous manner for its members. This painting really takes one, in a sense, right through to the end of the century. (22-23)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Aileen Ribeiro, "The Mirror of History: The Art of Dress in Late Eighteenth-Century France," 141-156, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Format indicated in bold below.
Portrait of Natalia Zakharovna Kolycheva, née Hitrovo
In her portrait by Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (fig. 108), Natalia Nakharovna Kolychova, who has a classical prop in the form of Jean Racine’s play Iphigénie on a green velvet cushion in front of her, wears a yellow cashmere shawl (the latest fashionable accessory) over a blue silk wrapping dress, a simple style derived from a dressing gown. A delicate neoclassical bracelet of gold and enamel, over her long sleeve, decorates her wrist. Like Madame George, Kolychova is depicted with a classical-style muslin bandeau in her hair. Kept in place by fine gold chains, which hold a locket probably containing a miniature of a loved one, a long fine white muslin or silk gauze scarf trails through Kolychova’s hair, winds round her neck, and modestly covers her décolletage. That kind of jewelry is very much in keeping with the period’s sentimentality and is in tune with a number of “limpid, fashionably artless” portraits painted by Vigée Le Brun, an artist who at times, according to Michael Levey, “confused simplicity in dress with goodness of heart,” a conflation that was widely made in this period and no doubt contributed to the painter’s success.11 Furthermore, the painter was able to combine high fashion with the mood of classical antiquity, giving her sitters a kind of Vogue glossiness alongside a sense of the timeless in the way her sitters’ shawls suggest figures on a Greek vase or in a Roman wall painting.
Too closely identified with the royal family to feel safe in France, Vigée Le Brun went into exile on the day the Parisian mob invaded Versailles; by 1795, her various travels in Europe had brought her to Russia. The sitter in this canvas, Madame Kolychova, like many wealthy Russian women, could afford to hire the French modistes who had settled in Moscow and Saint Petersburg during the French Revolution. She is elegantly dressed, albeit—in 1799—slightly behind the latest fashions in Paris. Now able to fully demonstrate the ideals of freedom and liberation advocated in the early days of the French Revolution, dress at the end of the century was often extreme in style, with bare arms, a waistline right under the bust, and filmy muslins that revealed the figure. Louis-Sébastien Mercier noted how in Paris in 1798, the “pretty women and the goddesses of the day . . . sweep the muddy streets of the capital with their flowing and transparent robes.”12
pages 152-154.
The sitter for this portrait, a member of the Russian nobility, is depicted as a fashionable and educated woman, reading the play Iphigenia by Racine in French and wearing fashionable clothing and accessories. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun creates a sense of spontaneity and interaction with the sitter, who seems to respond to our presence. Vigée-Lebrun spent five years in Russia after her exile from France during the Revolution. While there, she found many clients, such as this sitter, eager to be painted by the favorite portraitist of the late queen, Marie Antoinette.
Heather MacDonald
The Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator of European Art
November 2009
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Place of origin: Russia (inhabited place): TGN: 2634418
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
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PROVENANCE
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
WEB RESOURCES
- Chateau de Versailles~Check out this biography of Vigée-Lebrun from Versailles.
- University of Pennsylvania~Read the memoirs of Vigée-Lebrun.
- Khan Academy~Watch this video about another portrait by the artist.
- Khan Academy~Watch this video about a self portrait by Vigée-Lebrun.
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General Description
Born into an artistic family, Elisabeth Louise Vigée‑Lebrun took drawing lessons from her father and began working as a professional artist as a teenager. She became Queen Marie Antoinette’s official portrait painter, and in 1783 she was admitted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Forced into exile at the onset of the French Revolution, Vigée‑Lebrun continued to be a sought after portraitist. While living in Russia, she painted this striking portrait of Natalia Zakharovna Kolycheva, a member of the nobility. Vigée‑Lebrun presented her sitter as a refined and educated woman: she reads a French play and wears fashionable clothing, gold jewelry, and a classicizing hair accessory. Vigée-Lebrun was both celebrated and criticized for idealizing her sitters through the supple brushwork, rich hues, and soft lighting so skillfully demonstrated here.
Excerpt from
Kelsey Martin and Nicole Myers, DMA exhibition text Women Artists in Europe from the Monarchy to Modernism, 2018.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
- Chateau de Versailles~Check out this biography of Vigée-Lebrun from Versailles.
- University of Pennsylvania~Read the memoirs of Vigée-Lebrun.
- Khan Academy~Watch this video about another portrait by the artist.
- Khan Academy~Watch this video about a self portrait by Vigée-Lebrun.
Notes
Checked Piction
former number according to education doc- T43007.33
Other work by Vigee Lebrun in Collection- https://www.dma.org/object/artwork/4305928/- This painting is in an object package I made for Dealey works with commemorative books in archives.
In 1776 the beautiful and talented Elisabeth married the painter and art dealer Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun. From then on, the artist hyphenated her last name to Vigée-Lebrun. Unfortunately, it was her marriage to an art dealer that prevented her admission to the prestigious Royal Academy, which, in principle, frowned upon the sullying of an artist's stature through direct affiliation with the commercial art world. However, through the intervention of her influential patron, Marie Antoinette, Vigee-Lebrun was admitted to the Academy in 1783. From then on, she enjoyed a steady stream of high-profile commissions and exhibited regularly at the Salon to great critical acclaim. Her private parties at the Hotel Le Brun were legendary for their novelty, and the best of Parisian society could be found at her table.
It was with great dismay, then, that Vigee-Lebrun had to witness the events leading up to the fall of the ancien regime in 1789. A lifelong monarchist, Vigee-Lebrun fled Paris in 1789, after having been falsely accused of having an adulterous affair with the exiled Finance Minister Calonne. Over the next sixteen years, Madame Lebrun took refuge, first in Italy, then in Russia, where her artistic reputation as the portraitist of the queen put her in great demand with the aristocracy wherever she went. Her travels throughout Italy allowed her to study the Great Tradition firsthand, thereby deepening the sophistication of her art. However, the greatest influence on Vigee-Lebrun's art was the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, whose art she encountered when she toured Flanders and Holland with her husband in 1781.
Although Vigee-Lebrun was to return to France at last in 1805, her art had long fallen out of fashion in Paris. But, by then, she had amassed a small fortune as the itinerant portraitist of the European elite and was able to live out the rest of her days in relative ease. The first volume of her famous Souvenirs, chronicling her glamorous life as the favorite of Marie Antoinette and her travails after the fall of the ancien régime, was published in 1835. It remains an enduring portrait of the period, as witnessed by one of the most remarkable women painters of the 18th century.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 3
With a dynamic twist ofher body and lively expression, Madame Kolychova appears as though interrupted in her reading. This is the type of animated, polished, and supremely attractive portrait ofEuropean royalty and aristocracy that made Marie Louise Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun the most successful society painter ofthe eighteenth-century.
From- didactic and label copy in education files, no date or author.
VIGEE LEBRUN-
The last picture that Mr. Rosenberg bought was Portrait of Natalia Nakharovna Kolychova, née Hitrova (see fig. 108, p. 153), painted by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun in Saint Petersburg. Vigée Le Brun was a great portrait painter, who, like Vallayer-Coster, achieved success in a field that was dominated by men. Vigée Le Brun strongly admired Jean-Baptiste Greuze, was a pupil of Vernet, and also loved the sensuous quality of Rubens’s painting. She worked for the aristocracy and royal family—particularly for Marie Antoinette. At the time of the French Revolution, she traveled widely in Europe but ended up in Saint Petersburg at the Russian court, where she continued painting in this very luscious, sensuous manner for its members. This painting really takes one, in a sense, right through to the end of the century. (22-23)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Aileen Ribeiro, "The Mirror of History: The Art of Dress in Late Eighteenth-Century France," 141-156, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Format indicated in bold below.
Portrait of Natalia Zakharovna Kolycheva, née Hitrovo
In her portrait by Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (fig. 108), Natalia Nakharovna Kolychova, who has a classical prop in the form of Jean Racine’s play Iphigénie on a green velvet cushion in front of her, wears a yellow cashmere shawl (the latest fashionable accessory) over a blue silk wrapping dress, a simple style derived from a dressing gown. A delicate neoclassical bracelet of gold and enamel, over her long sleeve, decorates her wrist. Like Madame George, Kolychova is depicted with a classical-style muslin bandeau in her hair. Kept in place by fine gold chains, which hold a locket probably containing a miniature of a loved one, a long fine white muslin or silk gauze scarf trails through Kolychova’s hair, winds round her neck, and modestly covers her décolletage. That kind of jewelry is very much in keeping with the period’s sentimentality and is in tune with a number of “limpid, fashionably artless” portraits painted by Vigée Le Brun, an artist who at times, according to Michael Levey, “confused simplicity in dress with goodness of heart,” a conflation that was widely made in this period and no doubt contributed to the painter’s success.11 Furthermore, the painter was able to combine high fashion with the mood of classical antiquity, giving her sitters a kind of Vogue glossiness alongside a sense of the timeless in the way her sitters’ shawls suggest figures on a Greek vase or in a Roman wall painting.
Too closely identified with the royal family to feel safe in France, Vigée Le Brun went into exile on the day the Parisian mob invaded Versailles; by 1795, her various travels in Europe had brought her to Russia. The sitter in this canvas, Madame Kolychova, like many wealthy Russian women, could afford to hire the French modistes who had settled in Moscow and Saint Petersburg during the French Revolution. She is elegantly dressed, albeit—in 1799—slightly behind the latest fashions in Paris. Now able to fully demonstrate the ideals of freedom and liberation advocated in the early days of the French Revolution, dress at the end of the century was often extreme in style, with bare arms, a waistline right under the bust, and filmy muslins that revealed the figure. Louis-Sébastien Mercier noted how in Paris in 1798, the “pretty women and the goddesses of the day . . . sweep the muddy streets of the capital with their flowing and transparent robes.”12
pages 152-154.
The sitter for this portrait, a member of the Russian nobility, is depicted as a fashionable and educated woman, reading the play Iphigenia by Racine in French and wearing fashionable clothing and accessories. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun creates a sense of spontaneity and interaction with the sitter, who seems to respond to our presence. Vigée-Lebrun spent five years in Russia after her exile from France during the Revolution. While there, she found many clients, such as this sitter, eager to be painted by the favorite portraitist of the late queen, Marie Antoinette.
Heather MacDonald
The Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator of European Art
November 2009
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Place of origin: Russia (inhabited place): TGN: 2634418
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
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