Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a French portrait painter, born in Paris in 1755, who died there in 1842. She became Marie Antoinette's favorite painter, left France in October 1789 and spent twelve years working for the courts of Europe. People look her up for one picture, a self-portrait with her daughter in which she smiles with her teeth showing, something portraits were not supposed to do.
She smiled at the wrong moment and in front of the wrong audience: the Paris Salon of 1787, where painters hung their work for the whole city to judge.
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In the picture she showed that year, she holds her daughter Julie in her lap, both turned toward the viewer, and she smiles with her lips parted. Portraits of the day kept mouths shut.
Colin Jones, a historian of the eighteenth century smile, quotes an anonymous commentator who wrote: "An affectation which artists, art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning, and which finds no precedent amongst the Ancients, is that in smiling she shows her teeth. This affectation is particularly out of place in a mother."
The woman being scolded was no outsider. She was the painter of Marie Antoinette, admitted to the Académie royale with the help of the king and queen, and she had already been through one scandal over the queen's portrait. Four years earlier, in 1783, her picture of Marie Antoinette in a loose cotton dress had been pulled from the Salon.
Two years after the smile, she left Paris with Julie and did not come back for twelve years. The exile that followed did not end her career. It took her to Rome, Naples, Vienna and Saint Petersburg, and each court she reached was ready to pay for her portraits.
What You'll Discover
Why the guild closed her studio.
Who opened the Académie's door.
What the queen wore that offended.
What her open mouth set off.
Where twelve years took her.