Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun

Popular accounts put her output at around 660 portraits and roughly 200 landscapes, a total near 900 works, but that figure traces to general reference sources rather than to a completed scholarly count, and it should be read as a working estimate, not a final tally. No catalogue raisonne of her work has been published. Joseph Baillio, who organised a Kimbell Art Museum exhibition on her in 1982, has been preparing one for decades; as of the major 2015-2016 retrospective he co-organised with Katharine Baetjer and Paul Lang for the Grand Palais, the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery of Canada, it remained unpublished.

That retrospective is itself a measure of how thin the intervening scholarship was: a reviewer noted that after Baillio's 1982 catalogue, Vigee Le Brun had been the subject of relatively few scholarly studies for over thirty years. The New York venue alone showed 80 works, about a third of them from private collections and many exhibited publicly for the first time. It was the first international retrospective ever given to her.

She was trained first in pastel by her own father, Louis Vigee, a pastelist and a member of the rival Academie de Saint-Luc. He died when she was twelve, and she continued her training under Gabriel Briard and others before joining the Academie de Saint-Luc herself in 1774, two years before Louis XV suppressed it. By her teens she was already earning enough from portrait commissions to help support her widowed mother and younger brother, a fact usually offered as a charming anecdote about precocity rather than what it actually was: a teenage girl running a commercial studio because the household needed the income.

In 1776 she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a painter turned picture dealer. The marriage gave her a dealer's eye for the market and a dealer's connections. It also very nearly cost her the one credential that mattered most.

The Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture capped the number of women who could hold membership at any one time at four. When Vigee Le Brun's name came forward in 1783, alongside Adelaide Labille-Guiard, the initial objection was not that she was a woman as such but that her husband was a picture dealer, a trade the Academy treated as a conflict of interest against the very market its own members' work moved through. Louis XVI overrode the objection after Marie Antoinette intervened, and on 31 May 1783 both women were admitted on the same day, filling two of the four seats reserved for their sex.

Her reception piece was Peace Bringing Back Abundance, an allegorical composition of 1780 read at the time as a comment on Louis XVI's role in ending France's involvement in the American war. Reception was mixed: she was accused of plagiarism by some critics and praised by others, including the American painter John Trumbull, who singled out the quality of the coloring. The Academy seat did not survive the Revolution; the category of female academician was abolished with the institution itself in 1793.

She painted Marie Antoinette roughly thirty times over about six years, work that came with regular access to the queen's private apartments and a first commission, in 1778, that reportedly paid three times what the court's previous portraitist had been getting. In 1783 she exhibited a portrait of the queen wearing a simple gathered muslin gown and a straw hat, informal to the point of resembling contemporary underclothes, made from imported cotton rather than French silk at a moment when supporting the domestic silk trade was itself a political statement. The picture caused enough outrage that it was pulled from the Salon and replaced before the exhibition closed.

The irony is that the gown she was mocked for outlived the scandal by decades. The chemise a la reine became a genuine fashion movement, worn across aristocratic Europe within a year and still recognisable in the sheer Neoclassical silhouettes of the early nineteenth century. A queen's portraitist had, without quite intending to, helped design the wardrobe of the generation that would depose her.

Her own memoir, the Souvenirs, is the primary source for her fees, and it needs to be read as what it is: an account written in her eighties, decades after the events, by a woman with every reason to remember her career in the best light. With that caveat, the figures given are still useful as period comparanda. The first royal commission of 1778 is reported at six thousand livres, against an ordinary household servant's annual wage of around fifty livres and the price of a good carriage at roughly two thousand. Whatever the precision of the number, the order of magnitude is not in doubt: within a few years of her Academy admission she was among the highest-paid portraitists working in France, of either sex.

Her most reproduced image, the Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, is a signed copy she made in Brussels in 1782 of an original still in the Rothschild collection; both versions were shown at the 1783 Salon, and the National Gallery in London bought this copy in 1897 for 600 pounds. The pose is not an observed moment. It deliberately quotes Rubens's so-called Chapeau de Paille, a portrait of Susanna Lunden that in fact shows no straw hat at all, a mistranslation of the Flemish for felt that had stuck to the painting's popular title. Vigee Le Brun put herself in a genuine straw hat, holding her own palette and brushes, and looking directly out at the viewer with an openness Rubens's sitter does not have. It reads as a calculated claim of kinship with one of the acknowledged masters of the previous century, corrected on a point of fact and made by a working woman with her tools visibly in hand rather than a wealthy man's wife on display.

She returned to the same project with more risk four years later. Self-Portrait with Her Daughter, Julie, known as Maternal Tenderness, shown at the Salon of 1787 and now in the Louvre, shows her smiling with her teeth visible while she embraces her daughter. Open-mouthed smiling was not a convention of elite portraiture; the historian Colin Jones has traced the shift to improvements in dentistry that made good teeth worth displaying as a mark of status, but in 1787 it read to some viewers as closer to a tavern scene than a court likeness. The gossip sheet Memoires secrets condemned it as an affectation that artists, connoisseurs and people of taste had united in disapproving of, with no precedent among the ancients. Between the chemise portrait and this one, a pattern is visible: she kept testing how far an informal, physically present mode of representation, unpowdered, undraped in the old sense, smiling with an open mouth, could go before the court version of taste pushed back, and she kept pushing again.

She left Paris at midnight on 5 October 1789, as the crowd that would march on Versailles the same day was already forming, and did not return for twelve years. The itinerary reads like a European tour of courts rather than a flight: Turin, Parma, Rome and Naples, where she was elected to local academies, then Venice and Milan, three years in Vienna painting Austrian and emigre nobility, then more than six years in Russia, where she painted members of Catherine the Great's family and the deposed king of Poland. She was formally struck from the French state's list of emigres in 1800, which cleared the legal path home, and returned to Paris on 18 January 1802.

The exile is also the clearest evidence that her market was never only French. In 1788, the year before she left, she had painted three ambassadors sent to Louis XVI's court by Tipu Sultan of Mysore, seeking a military alliance against the British in India. The mission failed, and on their return to Mysore all three ambassadors were executed. One portrait from that commission, of the ambassador Muhammad Dervish Khan, survived through her husband's later liquidation of his dealer's stock and resurfaced at auction more than two centuries later, a direct physical link between a Rococo Parisian studio and a diplomatic failure on the other side of the world.

Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun's profession is usually mentioned only as the technicality that nearly blocked her Academy seat, but it shaped the object history of her work more directly than that. As a working picture dealer he held and traded canvases, including his wife's, and after his death his estate was liquidated and its stock dispersed onto the market rather than kept together as a single studio holding. That dispersal is a documented reason her paintings now sit in scattered private and institutional hands rather than in one traceable estate archive, and it is part of why a catalogue raisonne compiled two centuries later still has real work to do.

She herself lived another three decades past the Revolution, resettling permanently in France by 1805 after visits to England, and spent part of her final years, in her eighties, dictating and revising the Souvenirs with the help of her nieces Caroline Riviere and Eugenie Tripier Le Franc. She died on 30 March 1842 in Paris, in her eighty-seventh year.

Attribution problems on her material are not confined to popular-account round numbers. The portrait of her brother, Etienne Vigee, held by the Saint Louis Art Museum, has been identified by Laurent Hugues, a curator with the French national museums service, as a later signed copy rather than the original, which he places in a private Paris collection. This is precisely the kind of version-versus-copy question a finished catalogue raisonne exists to settle, and on this picture it has not yet been settled in public. Until it is, both the Saint Louis canvas and the claimed Paris original are best described exactly that way: two candidates, one documented dissent, no resolution.

For most of the twentieth century her prices lagged her reputation. That changed decisively on 30 January 2019, when Sotheby's New York sold the 1788 Portrait of Muhammad Dervish Khan for a price reported across the trade press as 7.18 to 7.2 million dollars, more than four times the previous auction record for her work, a 1.5 million dollar sale of a bust-length self-portrait at Christie's New York in October 2017. Coverage of the 2019 sale is not consistent about separating the hammer price from the buyer's premium, an ordinary failure of auction reporting and one this record flags rather than silently resolves; the closest figure to a stated hammer is 7,185,900 dollars. The sale was described at the time as a record for any pre-modern female artist at auction. A few years earlier, in April 2016, Christie's had sold her portrait of Princess Golitsyna for 1,205,000 dollars, itself then described as a record for an academicienne, a member of the Academy specifically, rather than for women artists generally. Both figures now read as staging posts rather than ceilings.