Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Complete Story
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted Marie-Antoinette about thirty times, scandalized Paris by smiling with her teeth showing in a self-portrait, and escaped the Revolution by stagecoach the night the mob marched on Versailles. Twelve years of exile made her Europe's portraitist.
Around 660 portraits, three royal courts, and a memoir that still outsells most of her sitters' biographies: the queen's painter ran the century's best one-woman business.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun at a glance:
1755: born in Paris, a portraitist's daughter; painting professionally in her teens, until the guild seizes her studio for practicing without a license.
1778: first sittings with Marie-Antoinette; some thirty portraits of the queen will follow.
1783: admitted to the Académie Royale, taking one of its four seats for women on the same day as her rival Labille-Guiard.
1789: flees Paris by stagecoach with her daughter on the night the royal family is marched from Versailles.
1842: dies in Paris at 86, her memoirs published, her count standing at about 660 portraits.
A teenager with a seized studio
She was born in Paris on April 16, 1755, daughter of a pastel portraitist who died when she was 12.
By her late teens she was supporting her family with portraits, so successfully that in 1774 the authorities seized her studio for practicing without a license; she fixed it by joining the painters' guild.
Her 1776 marriage to the art dealer Jean-Baptiste Le Brun opened collections to study, while he gambled away much of what she earned.
The queen's painter
Summoned to Versailles in 1778, she became Marie-Antoinette's preferred portraitist, producing about thirty images designed to soften the queen's reputation, including the 1783 portrait in a simple muslin dress, a scandal that had to be withdrawn from the Salon as underdressed royalty. That same year, on May 31, 1783, royal pressure carried her into the Academie Royale on the same day as Adelaide Labille-Guiard, filling two of the four seats the Academy allowed women in total.
More incredible painter stories
If Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun pulled you in, you will love these too:
The smile that broke the rules
Her 1786 self-portrait with her daughter shows the painter smiling with parted lips, teeth visible, and Paris gasped: a chronicler condemned an affectation which artists and persons of taste have long proscribed.
Centuries of decorum had kept teeth out of portraiture; a working mother put them in and kept painting. It reads today as the first modern smile in art.
October 1789: the stagecoach
On the night the crowd marched on Versailles in October 1789, Vigée Le Brun left Paris in a public stagecoach with her daughter Julie, disguised, and did not return for twelve years.
Exile became triumph: Naples and the portraits of Emma Hamilton, Vienna, then six years in St Petersburg painting the Russian aristocracy, then Berlin.
Struck from the emigre list in 1800, she returned to Paris in 1802 richer and more famous than she had left.
The myth of the flatterer
She is dismissed as the woman who prettified a doomed queen.
The ledger answers: roughly 660 portraits and 200 landscapes across six decades, prices male rivals envied, election to academies in Rome, Bologna, and St Petersburg, and technical departures, the smile, loose hair, plain muslin, that pushed portraiture toward naturalness while official painting stiffened.
Her Souvenirs, published in her eighties, remain a primary source for three courts.
Where to see her
She died in Paris on March 30, 1842, at 86. Versailles hangs the great Marie-Antoinette portraits, the Louvre the self-portraits with Julie, the National Gallery in London the straw-hat self-portrait, and the Met and the Hermitage the exile decades.
Twelve years, twelve courts
The stagecoach of 1789 opened a twelve-year working tour: Rome, Naples, Vienna, then six years in St Petersburg.
She arrived in each capital as a celebrity refugee and left with a full order book; the Bourbons' painter became Europe's.
In Russia she painted Catherine the Great's granddaughters, annoyed the empress with their bare arms, adjusted the sleeves, and stayed six years anyway.
The Souvenirs
In her eighties she published the Souvenirs, three volumes of memory, gossip and professional advice, down to how to keep a sitter's face from going tired.
The books tally her life like a ledger: around 660 portraits, 200 landscapes, and the fees that made her one of the century's best-paid women.
Historians check her stories carefully and end up keeping most of them. A woman who painted every court in Europe needed little embroidery.
Julie
The tenderest pictures are of her daughter Julie: reading, at a mirror, wrapped with her mother in one shawl.
In St Petersburg Julie married against her wishes; the rift never fully closed, and Julie died in Paris in 1819, before her mother.
The Souvenirs circle back to her constantly. The painter of Europe's queens counted one loss above all the others, and it was domestic.
The Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun questions that keep coming up
Who painted Marie-Antoinette? Vigée Le Brun, about thirty times between 1778 and 1789, from state portraits to the scandalous muslin chemise of 1783.
Why was her smile scandalous? Her 1786 self-portrait showed parted lips and visible teeth, breaking a convention as old as portraiture itself. Critics called it an affectation; everyone eventually copied it.
How did she survive the Revolution? She fled by stagecoach with her daughter in October 1789 and spent twelve years painting the courts of Naples, Vienna, St Petersburg, and Berlin.
Where can I see Vigée Le Brun? Versailles, the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the Met in New York, and the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
How much does a Vigée Le Brun cost? Her portrait of Muhammad Dervish Khan brought 7.2 million dollars in 2019, then a record for a woman artist of any early era.
How many self-portraits exist? Dozens, sent across Europe like calling cards: the straw-hat portrait answering Rubens, the Uffizi canvas showing her painting the queen from memory. She managed her own image as carefully as any sitter's.
More secrets to unlock
Two seats taken on the same May day
Of the four seats the French Academy allotted to women, she and Labille-Guiard took two on the same May day in 1783. The institution that rationed women to four would be dissolved by the Revolution; her career outlasted it by half a century.
