Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun

(France, 16/04/1755 - 30/03/1842)

While her foundational art knowledge came from her father, Vigée Lebrun was largely self-taught with her mastery of pastels allowing her to create soft textures and an almost airbrushed finish that rendered her sitters as appearing to be more attractive and desirable than in reality, making her the favourite portraitist of the French Enlightenment elite.

Obsessed with art history, she challenged herself to not only match but exceed the talent and accomplishments of both her contemporaries and the old master artists she found in galleries around Paris. Her success in this was not, however, easily won, and required her to overcome the gendered limitations of her time. In 1774, at the age of 19, she had already seen some success which, after coming to the attention of authorities, resulted in her materials being confiscated as it was illegal to work as an artist without membership to a guild or academy – something that, as a woman, was very difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Unrelenting in her ambition, she was commissioned to paint a portrait of Queen Marie-Antoinette just 4 years later, an extraordinary accomplishment considering she was still not a member of the academy or guild. By decree of the King, most likely at the insistence of Marie-Antoinette, she was finally granted membership to the Royal Academy in 1783 where she was one of just sixteen women to become full members of the Academy since its establishment in 1648.

Fleeing France at the outbreak of the 1789 Revolution, she took her pastels and portraiture technique to the royal courts of Europe, painting desirable portraits of monarchs, aristocracy and the noble elite, gaining membership to academies in Rome, Parma, Bologna, St Petersburg, Berlin, Geneva and Rouen, in addition to her Paris membership.

Despite her fame and undeniable talent, it was not until 2015 that the first major retrospective devoted to Vigée Lebrun was staged in France at Paris’s Grand Palais.

Image: Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782). Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 70.5 cm. The National Gallery, U.K.