I misinterpret the title of this new account of the life and artwork of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) as “Darling” and thus, momentarily, feared it will perpetuate the caricature of the French portraitist as mere society painter.
Fortunately, Daring kinds a part of an ongoing re-evaluation of Vigée Le Brun as an revolutionary, vital artist. Furthermore, in concentrating on the younger grownup (YA) market, it should help in wrenching artwork historical past from these patriarchs of the twentieth century who gave girls painters quick shrift. As Simon Schama identified in Residents (1989), “Vigée Le Brun has, till fairly lately, been written off as simply one other gentle entertainer of the ancien régime … However in her time she was fairly appropriately recognised as a phenomenon.”
It’s this phenomenal facet of Vigée Le Brun’s life that Jordana Pomeroy, the director and chief govt officer of the Currier Museum of Artwork and previously the chief curator on the Nationwide Museum of Ladies within the Arts, thinks will converse to a youthful readership going through “gender-related challenges”. Vigée Le Brun battled appreciable sexual prejudice: her virtuosic work was attributed by some incredulous critics to the much less spectacular hand of François Guillaume Ménageot, her lodger. Pomeroy describes her coping with this and different hurdles via “expertise, persistence and independence”.
In a language and format tailor-made to the sound-bite technology, Pomeroy’s narrative hops from one biographical stepping stone to the following, its textual content concise and signposted. She deftly makes use of 18th-century work as portals to the broader historic context. There may be a lot to benefit a look: Vigée Le Brun’s profession started within the corridors of ancien régime Versailles, she then fled Revolutionary France, roamed Europe because it was riven by the Napoleonic wars and sparked a sartorial revolution within the Russian courtroom of Catherine the Nice, earlier than returning house to witness the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
In the meantime, the guide’s 5 chapters are punctuated by illustrations of what its YA readership may name Vigée Le Brun’s “bangers”: from the sharply alert Self-portrait with Cerise Ribbons and her ground-breaking Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Costume (round 1782 and 1783 respectively, each the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York) by way of her sinuous portrayal of the velvet-clad Baronne de Crussol Florensac (1785, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse), the boldly colored renditions of an inspirational Emma, Girl Hamilton, to her neoclassical re-versioning of Russian aristocracy.
Historic alignment
Pomeroy acknowledges the self-confidence underpinning Vigée Le Brun’s success and survival, as seen within the echo of Peter-Paul Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden (“Le Chapeau de Paille”) in her 1782 Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, each now on the Nationwide Gallery, London, the latter featured on Daring’s cowl: only one instance, as Pomeroy observes, the place the painter “aligned herself with historical past’s nice artists”.
But Pomeroy avoids exploring the sturdy dialogue that existed between Vigée Le Brun’s work and people of her friends Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Joseph Duplessis and, crucially, Jacques-Louis David. Pomeroy’s commentary that Self-portrait with Julie (exhibited 1789, Louvre), the place the artist, dressed à l’vintage, presents herself as one of many sidelined girls in David’s Neo-Classical epics, challenged “prevailing concepts about gender and conformity”, falls wanting conveying absolutely Vigée Le Brun’s engagement with the sexual politics of her personal time. In her memoir, Souvenirs (revealed in 1835), the painter argued that the period of Marie Antoinette was one the place “girls reigned”, however “the Revolution de-throned them”. Pomeroy’s gender-conscious readership might need been to know that this portray emerged amid a raging debate concerning the function of girls in pre- and post-Revolutionary France; had the novel writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in its sights; and supplied a feminine and female counterpoint to David’s muscular imaginative and prescient of male gloire.
Even whereas acknowledging Vigée Le Brun as an innovator, Pomeroy additionally shies away from probably the most seen facet of her work—her colouration. The wealthy vibrancy of Vigée Le Brun’s palette was a lot commented on in her day: her experiments with complementary color had been so efficient that the Austrian noble, Prince Wenzel Paar, redecorated the rooms housing her 1793 portrait of Countess Maria Theresia Bucquoi (Minneapolis Institute of Artwork) to higher accommodate the eye-watering results of the red-green color scheme.
Nevertheless, within the spirit of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s touch upon one other nice 18th-century painter, Angelica Kauffman, that “one should search for what she does, not what she fails to do”, this guide must be celebrated. Full of life, knowledgeable and punctiliously produced to interact an entry-level viewers, its give attention to an “Outdated Mistress” will contribute to the levelling up nonetheless so desperately wanted within the story of artwork. Daring reveals a painter whose profession was exceptional due to her intercourse, however whose work was distinctive no matter it.
• Franny Moyle’s twin biography Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun (Head of Zeus) was revealed on 9 October
