Vigee Le Brun said she loved this effect, but she has the light leading up from her semi-exposed breast into her frankly returned gaze. "This painting inspired me to the point where I made my own portrait in search of the same effect", wrote Vigee Le Brun, but this self-portrait - the artist's "autograph" copy of a previous version - does much more than emulate the light effects she admired in the Rubens. Her mother, Jeanne, was a hairdresser. In 1789, after the arrest of the royal family during the French Revolution, Vigée Le Brun fled France with her young daughter, Julie. Did she like it? Vigée Le Brun’s membership in the Académie dissolved after the French Revolution because female academicians were abolished. She was one of only fifteen women to be granted full membership in the Académie between 1648 and 1793. That's what she wanted her contemporaries to say when they saw this seductive, confident, intellectual, pastoral, spontaneous, erudite... just listing the attributes the painting attributes to its subject and creator is exhausting. 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She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers, and was elected to art academies in ten cities. Works Cited. Born in Paris on 16 April 1755, Élisabeth Louise Vigée was the daughter of Jeanne (née Maissin) (1728–1800), a hairdresser, and portraitist and fan painter, Louis Vigée, from whom she received her first instruction. and Mrs. Andrews” by Thomas Gainsborough, “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby, “Self-portrait in a Straw Hat” by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, “The Emperor Napoleon I” by Horace Vernet, “Dido Building Carthage” by J. M. W. Turner, “Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows” by John Constable, “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” by Paul Delaroche, “The Fighting Temeraire” by Joseph Mallord William Turner, “Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway” by J. M. W. Turner, “Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence” by Frederic Leighton, “Madame Moitessier” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, “After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself” by Edgar Degas, “Boulevard Montmartre at Night” by Camille Pissarro, Title: Self-portrait in a Straw Hat, Artist: Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Dimensions: 97.8 × 70.5 cm (38.5 × 27.7 in), Died: 1842 (aged 86) – Paris, France. The works of the modern Minerva are the first to attract the eyes of the spectator, call him back repeatedly, take hold of him, possess him, elicit from him exclamations of pleasure and admiration" - anonymous report on the 1783 Paris Salon. She and Marie-Antoinette shared a cult of simple things uncomfortably at odds with the wealth of the court. They would have recognised this painting as a version of what was then one of the best-loved portraits in the world, Rubens's The Straw Hat (1622-25), actually showing its subject Susanna Lunden wearing a felt hat. Between 1835 and 1837 when Vigée Le Brun was in her eighties when she published her memoirs in three volumes, Souvenirs. Le Brun’s artistic style was part of the aftermath of Rococo, while she also adopted a neoclassical style. • Discuss how you would choose to pose in your own portrait. In 1760, at the age of five, she entered a convent, where she remained until 1766. In David's art the most noble thing a woman can do is kill herself. Where is it? Self Portrait in a Straw Hat is a signed copy by the artist of a very popular self portrait that she painted in 1782 and which is now in the collection of the baronne Edmond de Rothschild. As her career blossomed, Vigée Le Brun was granted patronage by Marie Antoinette. Vigee Le Brun's father was an unsuccessful painter she easily eclipsed him. We assume so, since she did more than one version and wrote about it: "Mme Le Brun - is she not astonishing? In 1776 she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a painter, and art dealer, and soon after started painted portraits of many of the nobility. Her decolletage is revealing, not unseemly, and if you thought the rustic garb meant she was poor, look at those earrings. It is a woman’s image. Rubens's Susanna Lunden is both more sexually available to the viewer and more timid. Her color palette was Rococo influenced, but her style assumed the emerging Neoclassicism. In the 1700s, Madame Le Brun painted portraits of nobility, and with Marie Antoinette’s support, her career flourished. After fleeing the French, she lived and worked in the major European capitals. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1997. Vigee Le Brun looks at us frankly, holding a painter's palette that isn't aggressively asserted but is just there. Find more prominent pieces of self-portrait at Wikiart.org – best visual art database. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! After a sustained campaign by her ex-husband and other family members, her name removed from the list of counter-revolutionary émigrés. – Auguste Rodin, Photo Credit: 1) Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, Sponsor a Masterpiece with YOUR NAME CHOICE for $5. Because it is so much harder to spend time outside during the lockdown use your imagination to paint yourself in an outdoors scene without leaving the house. Born in Paris, she was the daughter of a portraitist and fan painter, Louis Vigée, from whom she received her first instruction. In 1783, Vigée Le Brun was received as a member of the Académie Royale. She painted more than thirty portraits of the queen and her family. • Life in Lockdown activity: Elisabeth painted this portrait of herself outside but in reality she was in her studio. Like Marie-Antoinette, Vigee Le Brun attracted sleazy gossip she was said to sleep with the men she painted. She is dressed in a self-consciously natural style that shows she has read Rousseau she has a rustic straw hat, no powder, unkempt hair (a style she took credit for introducing to the French court). By the time she was in her early teens, Élisabeth was painting portraits professionally. Her father died when she was 12 years old. In her twelve-year absence from France, she lived and worked in Italy, Austria, Russia, and Germany. In the Rubens there is flesh for the male eye, yet Lunden's face is in shadow in Vigee Le Brun's self- portrait it is her entire social being that is illuminated. So there is a courage to Vigee Le Brun's self-portrait that isn't immediately obvious, but it would have been to contemporaries. Many of her paintings are owned by major museums, such as the Louvre, Hermitage Museum, National Gallery in London, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and many other collections in continental Europe and the United States. The National Gallery, London WC2 (020-7747 2885). It is a woman’s portrait. The pose is deliberately modelled on Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden (?) In 1768, her mother married a wealthy jeweller, Jacques-François Le Sèvre, and shortly after, the family moved to the Rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Palais Royal. Her Self Portrait in a Straw Hat shows this and more. She became a star of the biennial public art exhibition, the Salon, specialising in portraits of courtiers, their children, and, most importantly, her friend the Queen.