Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun: Biography, Work and Legacy
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Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun: Biography, Work and Legacy
Sale price
$9.99
Regular price $11.99
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was famous in her lifetime, but her work relating to the Ancien Regime and Queen Marie-Antoinette in particular would be undervalued until the 21st century. The self-portrait of her with her daughter Julie hung in the Louvre, was considered attractive but was heavily criticized for its theme of motherhood by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex in 1949: "Instead of devoting herself generously to the work of perfecting her talent, this woman-artist regards it as a mere ornament to her life; the book and the picture are for her only an insubstantial medium which enables her to expose that essential reality: her own personality. So her personality is the main - sometimes the only - subject that interests her: Mme Vigée - Lebrun never tires of fixing her joyful motherhood on her canvases".
At the end of the 20th century, the work of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was much commented upon and studied by American feminists in the analysis of the cultural politics of the arts through the questions raised by her extraordinary career, paralleling the relationship that united her work with Marie-Antoinette's life, the establishment of her reputation as an artist, her relationship with her male contemporaries, the society of court ladies that was her main royalist clientele, her attitude to the Revolution, the lively discussion of the Constituent Assembly's ban on women studying at the Beaux-Arts, and her narcissism and fixation on the theme of motherhood as female identity.
Elements of Romanticism were not alien to her creative method, but she never dressed her characters in historical costumes, although she did, for example, portray Lady Hamilton as Sibylla or Bacchante, and the novelist Madame de Staël as the heroine of her novel, the poet Corinna.
The artist endowed her heroines, in a very feminine way, with a deliberate, coquettish simplicity, without caring much about their psychology...
At the same time, she invariably idealized her models. As a portraitist, she was everywhere a great success. Her ability to anticipate the desire of her client and to please his idea of himself, she learned from Jean-Baptiste Grose, whose paintings she constantly copied. Like a skilled hairdresser or a retoucher of black-and-white prints, she possessed the astonishing ability to make each model beautiful according to the fashion of her time.
At the end of the 20th century, the work of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was much commented upon and studied by American feminists in the analysis of the cultural politics of the arts through the questions raised by her extraordinary career, paralleling the relationship that united her work with Marie-Antoinette's life, the establishment of her reputation as an artist, her relationship with her male contemporaries, the society of court ladies that was her main royalist clientele, her attitude to the Revolution, the lively discussion of the Constituent Assembly's ban on women studying at the Beaux-Arts, and her narcissism and fixation on the theme of motherhood as female identity.
Elements of Romanticism were not alien to her creative method, but she never dressed her characters in historical costumes, although she did, for example, portray Lady Hamilton as Sibylla or Bacchante, and the novelist Madame de Staël as the heroine of her novel, the poet Corinna.
The artist endowed her heroines, in a very feminine way, with a deliberate, coquettish simplicity, without caring much about their psychology...
At the same time, she invariably idealized her models. As a portraitist, she was everywhere a great success. Her ability to anticipate the desire of her client and to please his idea of himself, she learned from Jean-Baptiste Grose, whose paintings she constantly copied. Like a skilled hairdresser or a retoucher of black-and-white prints, she possessed the astonishing ability to make each model beautiful according to the fashion of her time.