Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-LeBrun, a Rococo era painter turned Neoclassical, was born in Paris on April 16, 1755. She lived to be eighty—seven as “one of the foremost portraitists in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and during the first three decades of the nineteenth” (NGA, web) (May, 1). Spanning a long career with over 600 paintings, Vigée-LeBrun is “characterized” and marveled “…as the much sought-after portraitist of not only European royalty and nobility, but also of notable personalities in the arts and letters of her time” (May, 1). Accomplishing an early start in her career, Vigée-LeBrun, at the age of fifteen, she was already supporting her recently widowed mother and younger brother through her portrait paintings (NMWA, web).
…show more content…
“Ironically, the artist who would be condemned by the revolutionaries for her close association with the monarchy and nobility of the Old Regime actually owed a great deal of her early and spectacular success to her uncanny ability of representing her aristocratic subjects as unpretentious, thoughtful people in informal attire caught in moments of unguarded introspection” (May, 3). Fleeing to Rome “…in disguise” with “her nine-year-old daughter, she was still very active and received numerous commissions” having made a name for herself through her artwork (NGA, web). During the “Reign of Terror” in 1792 both Marie-Antoinette and her husband Louis XVI would be executed (Stokstand, 933). She would later write in her personal diary “Souvenirs”, wishing she would have lost her eyesight than witness the bloodshed of humanity. While also writing to her brother “I would like to be blind or to have drunk from the River of Forgetfulness to live on this blood soaked earth” (Sheriff,
“Ironically, the artist who would be condemned by the revolutionaries for her close association with the monarchy and nobility of the Old Regime actually owed a great deal of her early and spectacular success to her uncanny ability of representing her aristocratic subjects as unpretentious, thoughtful people in informal attire caught in moments of unguarded introspection” (May, 3). Fleeing to Rome “…in disguise” with “her nine-year-old daughter, she was still very active and received numerous commissions” having made a name for herself through her artwork (NGA, web). During the “Reign of Terror” in 1792 both Marie-Antoinette and her husband Louis XVI would be executed (Stokstand, 933). She would later write in her personal diary “Souvenirs”, wishing she would have lost her eyesight than witness the bloodshed of humanity. While also writing to her brother “I would like to be blind or to have drunk from the River of Forgetfulness to live on this blood soaked earth” (Sheriff,