I misread the title of this new account of the life and art of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) as “Darling” and thus, momentarily, feared it would perpetuate the caricature of the French portraitist as mere society painter.
Thankfully, Daring forms part of an ongoing re-evaluation of Vigée Le Brun as an innovative, significant artist. Moreover, in targeting the young adult (YA) market, it will assist in wrenching art history from those patriarchs of the 20th century who gave women painters short shrift. As Simon Schama pointed out in Citizens (1989), “Vigée Le Brun has, until quite recently, been written off as just another light entertainer of the ancien régime … But in her time she was quite correctly recognised as a phenomenon.”
It is this phenomenal aspect of Vigée Le Brun’s life that Jordana Pomeroy, the director and chief executive officer of the Currier Museum of Art and formerly the chief curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, thinks will speak to a younger readership facing “gender-related challenges”. Vigée Le Brun battled considerable sexual prejudice: her virtuosic work was attributed by some incredulous critics to the less impressive hand of François Guillaume Ménageot, her lodger. Pomeroy describes her dealing with this and other hurdles through “talent, persistence and independence”.
In a language and format tailored to the sound-bite generation, Pomeroy’s narrative hops from one biographical stepping stone to the next, its text concise and signposted. She deftly uses 18th-century paintings as portals to the wider historical context. There is much to merit a glance: Vigée Le Brun’s career began in the corridors of ancien régime Versailles, she then fled Revolutionary France, roamed Europe as it was riven by the Napoleonic wars and sparked a sartorial revolution in the Russian court of Catherine the Great, before returning home to witness the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
Meanwhile, the book’s five chapters are punctuated by illustrations of what its YA readership might call Vigée Le Brun’s “bangers”: from the sharply alert Self-portrait with Cerise Ribbons and her ground-breaking Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress (around 1782 and 1783 respectively, both the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) via her sinuous portrayal of the velvet-clad Baronne de Crussol Florensac (1785, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse), the boldly coloured renditions of an inspirational Emma, Lady Hamilton, to her neoclassical re-versioning of Russian aristocracy.
Historical alignment
Pomeroy acknowledges the self-confidence underpinning Vigée Le Brun’s success and survival, as seen in the echo of Peter-Paul Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden (“Le Chapeau de Paille”) in her 1782 Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, both now at the National Gallery, London, the latter featured on Daring’s cover: just one example, as Pomeroy observes, where the painter “aligned herself with history’s great artists”.
Yet Pomeroy avoids exploring the robust dialogue that existed between Vigée Le Brun’s work and those of her peers Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Joseph Duplessis and, crucially, Jacques-Louis David. Pomeroy’s observation that Self-portrait with Julie (exhibited 1789, Louvre), where the artist, dressed à l’antique, presents herself as one of the sidelined women in David’s Neo-Classical epics, challenged “prevailing ideas about gender and conformity”, falls short of conveying fully Vigée Le Brun’s engagement with the sexual politics of her own time. In her memoir, Souvenirs (published in 1835), the painter argued that the era of Marie Antoinette was one where “women reigned”, but “the Revolution de-throned them”. Pomeroy’s gender-conscious readership might have been interested to know that this painting emerged amid a raging debate about the role of women in pre- and post-Revolutionary France; had the radical writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in its sights; and offered a female and feminine counterpoint to David’s muscular vision of male gloire.
Even while acknowledging Vigée Le Brun as an innovator, Pomeroy also shies away from the most visible aspect of her work—her colouration. The rich vibrancy of Vigée Le Brun’s palette was much commented on in her day: her experiments with complementary colour were so effective that the Austrian noble, Prince Wenzel Paar, redecorated the rooms housing her 1793 portrait of Countess Maria Theresia Bucquoi (Minneapolis Institute of Art) to better accommodate the eye-watering effects of the red-green colour scheme.
However, in the spirit of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s comment on another great 18th-century painter, Angelica Kauffman, that “one must look for what she does, not what she fails to do”, this book should be celebrated. Lively, informed and carefully produced to engage an entry-level audience, its focus on an “Old Mistress” will contribute to the levelling up still so desperately needed in the story of art. Daring reveals a painter whose career was remarkable because of her sex, but whose work was exceptional regardless of it.
• Franny Moyle’s dual biography Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun (Head of Zeus) was published on 9 October
