By Judith Lissauer Cromwell
During my first outing to an art museum, I threw a temper tantrum. The Hitler regime had forced our family to flee from Berlin to London. My parents, busy physicians, spent their Saturdays at museums because my father was an art enthusiast; they took three-year-old me along. At the last museum we visited that Saturday afternoon, I lay down on the floor, drummed my heels, and screamed, “no more museums!”
That attitude did not last long. So, when reviewers raved about a Vigée le Brun retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I live, I went to see the exhibit despite never having heard of the artist. Louise-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun’s paintings were riveting, her brief introductory biography intriguing. This unusual woman, I vowed to myself, would be the subject of my next book.
Vigée Le Brun adored her father. Pastelist Louis Vigée died when his daughter was twelve. He had been her teacher and mentor. This mattered. Women were barred from attending life classes at the Académie royale de peinture et sculpture because they were thought too modest to look at the male nudes who posed for art students so that they could learn anatomy.
Basic to an artist’s education, drawing from life was also the bedrock of history painting, which glorified the human (mostly male) body in heroic action. History painting represented the top tier of artistic recognition, one every ambitious artist, male or female, coveted.
Feminine modesty also barred girls from schools where aspiring male artists learned the mechanics of their profession — the mathematics needed for drawing perspective and creating complex compositions; basic subjects for history painting (anatomy, geography, history, and literature.) Because contemporary wisdom – if wisdom was what one could call it – held that studying such intellectual subjects would harm a woman’s health and hurt her ability to reproduce. Her gender thus stood in the way of Vigée Le Brun’s ultimate recognition as a professional painter.
Vigée Le Brun overcame the limits put on women’s artistic growth by studying the works of great painters. Driven by ambition, she poured talent, character, and courage into creating a unique and instantly identifiable painting style – brilliant use of color, dramatic flair, perceptive poses, and the ability to present her sitters as vibrant human beings.
Yes, her gender stopped Vigée Le Brun from earning the title of history painter, but actually, she did not need it. Portraiture was a major genre; also an acceptable genre for women painters. As a leading portraitist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century aristocracy Vigée Le Brun earned a recognition rare among history’s handful of female artists.
Her father’s death devastated Vigée le Brun – she could no longer pick up her brush and palette. Alarmed, her mother sought to distract the young girl from her grief by taking her to look at great paintings.
Museums as we know them today did not exist in Vigée Le Brun’s youth. Paintings hung in private galleries. Vigée Le Brun’s mother used her late husband’s connections to gain entry; plus, she wangled permission for her daughter to work there.
“From the minute I entered one of these gorgeous galleries, I behaved exactly like a bee, because I garnered so much knowledge and such useful ideas for my art all the while intoxicated with pleasure in contemplating the great masters,” Vigée Le Brun tells us in her memoirs.
She refreshed her unique style by continuing to study the works of illustrious painters. Forced to leave France as the Revolution ramped up, Vigée Le Brun went to Italy, home of the Renaissance and classical antiquity, mecca for every aspiring artist. From Rome she traveled to Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, later to London. In these European capitals and during her many stops enroute, Vigée Le Brun visited important art galleries. She never stopped learning.
Vigée Le Brun immortalized the men who tried to rescue the French monarchy; pro and anti-revolutionary European nobles; illustrious artists, musicians, and poets. And rather than merely portraying as pretty puppets the females that decorated Versailles, Vigée Le Brun depicted these beautiful, aristocratic women who personified pre-revolutionary France as vivid personalities.
Vigée Le Brun’s early success caught the attention of French Queen Marie-Antoinette, whose exacting mother, the Empress of Austria, wanted a formal portrait of Marie-Antoinette as Queen of France. Several male artists had, over a ten year period, failed to please. Desperate, Marie-Antoinette decided to try a young female artist who had become “the fashion” in Paris. Vigée Le Brun’s Marie-Antoinette in Full Court Dress succeeded. Their joint triumph created a bond between queen and artist.
Vigée Le Brun painted many portraits of Marie-Antoinette. Some were sent to the queen’s friends in foreign countries, others to French embassies in foreign capitals. King Louis XVI presented a portrait of himself and one of Marie-Antoinette by Vigée Le Brun to the US Congress to mark the birth of the new nation. Her exposure as the French queen’s painter brought Vigée Le Brun fame throughout the Western world.
Portraiture thus provided a path to success and royal patronage. Portraiture enabled Vigée Le Brun to earn a good living, eventually, enough to secure an independent future.
Her success in carrying the genre of portraiture to unparalleled peaks left posterity a striking picture of an exciting and vital time in Western history, a time when Europe stood on the cusp of the modern era. That achievement distinguishes Vigée Le Brun not only for the historical connection that gives many of her portraits particular importance, but also because her talent assures the most illustrious of her creations a prominent place in any premier painting collection.
After a successful corporate career, Judith Lissauer Cromwell returned to academia as an independent historian and biographer of powerful women. The daughter of a pioneering female physician, one of a handful admitted to the staff of New York Hospital in the early 1950s, Cromwell entered the international world of Wall Street in 1973 as one of its few female executives. She not only thrived in the clubby male world of Wall Street, but also, as a single working parent, raised two children.
She is the author of the biographies “Dorothea Lieven: A Russian Princess in London and Paris 1785-1857,” “Florence Nightingale, Feminist,” and “Good Queen Anne: Appraising the Life and Reign of the Last Stuart Monarch.”
Her latest biography, “Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Portrait of an Artist, 1755-1842” provides a fresh and balanced perspective on the life of a renowned, yet often overlooked, painter. Drawn from her memoirs, archival research, and reexamination of the judgment of her contemporaries, this book portrays a single working mother who survived because of her cachet, charisma, and artistic talent. Cast on a storm-tossed continent, solely reliant on her palette, Vigee Le Brun produced some of her major works during her twelve-year exile, returning to France to continue her work after Napoleon had restored stability. Her story is one of triumph, adversity, perseverance, and ultimately peace.
