Élisabeth Vigee Le Brun
Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was a friend and favourite artist of Marie-Antoinette, and the most stylish portrait painter in France on the eve of the Revolution. She was the daughter and pupil of a minor Parisian painter, Louis Vigée. Her fashionable portraits in the simple style called à la grecque dispense with Baroque props of columns or curtains to demonstrate 'natural' manners and feelings, anticipating the Neo-classical portraits of David.Vigee Le Brun looks at us frankly, holding a painter's palette that isn't aggressively asserted but is just there. 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). Her decolletage is revealing, not unseemly, and if you thought the rustic garb meant she was poor, look at those earrings.So there is a courage to Vigee Le Brun's self-portrait that isn't immediately obvious, but it would have been to contemporaries. 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. We will present it to you pretty soon :)
See you tomorrow!
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