Infant Academies and the Childhood of Art: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun's Julie with a Mirror

At the 1787 Paris Salon Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun exhibited her exceptional portrait of her seven-year old daughter Julie, gazing into a mirror. This paper examines the complex, layered meaning of this work, emphasizing the visual and symbolic significance of the mirror. Considered in relation to popular imagery of children performing the tasks of adult artists (here called the "infant academy") and framed as an allegory of Sight, the painting not only offers a novel rendition of eighteenth-century childhood, but also forwards a powerful meta-critical discourse on the art of painting itself. It is argued that in staging her daughter's "naïve" and "childlike" vision as a metaphor for her own natural creative abilities to mimic and emulate, Vigée-Lebrun also comments on her particular placement as woman artist within an artistic world dominated by the academy.