Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun – a Pioneering Woman Painter in the 18th Century

The text below is the excerpt of the book Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (ISBN: 9781683256083), written by W. H. Helm, published by Parkstone International.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842) was a French painter, one of the most prominent portraitists of the late 18th century. Born in Paris, she showed exceptional talent from a young age and received formal training in art. Vigée-Lebrun’s career flourished during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and she became the official portraitist of the queen.

Her style was characterized by elegance, grace, and a focus on capturing the personality and charm of her subjects. Vigée-Lebrun’s portraits often depicted members of the aristocracy and royalty, as well as influential figures of her time. She was known for her ability to flatter her sitters while also infusing her paintings with a sense of intimacy and warmth.

During the French Revolution, Vigée-Lebrun fled France due to her connections with the royal family. She traveled extensively throughout Europe, establishing herself as a sought-after portrait painter in aristocratic circles. Her memoirs provide valuable insights into her life and the artistic milieu of her time.

The motives and actions of a person cannot be properly appreciated without regard to the general trend of thought and social conditions in which that person grew up and played a part in the drama of experience. In the case of Vigée-Lebrun these factors are of even special importance, because she lived at one of those rare epochs in which evolution gives place to convulsion, and the division between past and future is marked by a cleft, instead of by a mere shifting of another bead on the endless rosary of Time.

As every reader who is likely to trouble about Paris history is well aware, the French Revolution did not begin in July 1789, when the Bastille was destroyed by the mob. The spirit of popular revolt against the old order, the determination on the part of the manual makers of wealth to have some share in its advantages, had long been spreading not only below, but upon the surface of society in Western Europe.

As far back as 1766 an insurrection in Madrid, largely brought about by the excessive taxation of bread and oil, had been marked by incidents between the Spanish Court and people which, in the light of after years, seem like dress rehearsals for the days when the women of the Paris slums marched to Versailles, and when the French King and his family fled, with such disastrous results, to Varennes. In that same year of the Madrid revolt there were serious outbreaks in France, which, for the time being, the Government was strong enough to suppress.

Sixteen years earlier Lord Chesterfield had noted that the “germ of reason” which Du Clos, the historian, had about that time declared to be developing itself in France, must prove fatal to the monarchy and the church as they then existed. Every warning, however, was lost on the people whose manner of life was a principal source of discontent. Had the whole nation shared in hardships that were borne for the common welfare, the suffering of the toilers could more easily have been endured. Most of the army of courtiers, sons and grandsons of those whom, for reasons of policy, Louis XIV had compelled to spend their time at Versailles, lived in idle luxury.

The nobility was as distinct from the people without the particle “de,” as the officers of a big ship are distinct from the crew. A nobleman was treated as a being set apart by Providence to enjoy the Court and its pleasures; the rest of the people were born into the world to produce the food and raiment and other wealth which he and his class required, or to minister to his needs by keeping shops or lending money.

Between the nobles and the shopkeepers came a vaguely defined class, largely made up of men of letters and artists, whose powers of entertaining or otherwise pleasing made them welcome in the houses of the courtiers and even attracted the courtiers into their dwellings.

If everything was roturier to the noble outside his own class, the typical bourgeois, or plain citizen possessed of substantial means, was often more antipathetic to the working-class than were the nobles themselves. He had no “Divine Right,” and his airs of superiority were harder to excuse than those from which they were imitated. Yet it was chiefly through the advance in political influence of the wealthy middle-class that the nobles were losing power in the state, wherein the position, both of themselves and (paradoxically as it may at first sight seem) of their supplanters who were not “noble,” was rapidly becoming untenable.

All this is the commonplace of history. Yet, in the days when Madame Vigée-Lebrun was painting the belles of Paris and Versailles, scarcely a fear troubled their minds, or hers, save that of scandalous tittle-tattle.

Sincere love, which at most periods of recorded history has been one of the chief social forces at work, was never less powerful in any civilised society than among the courtiers and their parasites in the thirty years preceding the Revolution. The human butterflies that fluttered in the bowers and coppices of Versailles and Marly had no longer that capacity for ardent passion which had existed among their grandparents…

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