Souvenirs, 1755–1842. Énoncé des différents bruits. Conseils sur la peinture du portrait par Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (review)

Long decried as an unserious and frivolous artist,Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun has recently been enjoying a re-evaluation. She won her reputation as Marie-Antoinette's favourite painter as much by charm and talent as by connections or birthright. An unflinching and rather unquestioning royalist throughout her long life, she rejected the Revolution in all its forms. Abandoning France in 1789, she pursued life as a restlessémigrée, experiencing a gilded and itinerant mendicancy around the court cities of Europe before returning to France in 1801. There would follow further travels, much socializing, and a great deal of work. But at her death in 1842 she was better known as a celebrity than valued as a painter. Vigée Le Brun was surprisingly little appreciated by connoisseurs in her lifetime: no public establishment in her homeland owned any of her paintings throughout her long life. Joseph Baillio and Xavier Salmon's weighty and erudite catalogue of the magnificent exhibition dedicated to her work that went on show in Paris, New York, and Ottawa in 2015–16 has done much to promote a more serious engagement with the artist. Before that, Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac devoted her well-received Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: histoire d'un regard (Paris: Flammarion, 2011) to the same cause. She now supplies this extremely scholarly edition of Vigée Le Brun's Souvenirs. This is far from a routine reprint. The editor has established an authoritative text, based on the 1835 version but also drawing on findings in neglected archival sources. The value she adds to the work includes full and scrupulously detailed footnotes, a range of ancillary texts (notably Vigée Le Brun's own lists of her paintings, her advice on portraits, and separate indices for names, places, and works), plus an extensive bibliography. One regrets only that there is room for few illustrations, which are all crammed into sixteen pages of plates. The edition will be of interest, moreover, in offering not only a contribution to the re-evaluation of Vigée Le Brun's life and works but also a re-interpretation of the Souvenirs, distilled in a superb 100-page Introduction. Started when Vigée Le Brun was over seventy years of age, published when she was eighty, the Souvenirs, Haroche-Bouzinac shows, are curiously hybridic. Pitched halfway between autobiography and recollections, they bridge the divide between a simple chronicle and an interpretation of a remarkable life; pass in and out of the epistolary format; and alternate sustained narrative passages with lists of pen-portraits. The Souvenirs highlight a capacious memory for past times of an author who confessed to never having kept a diary. But distance added nostalgic enchantment to the view (especially of the Ancien Régime), while also permitting selective airbrushing of painful personal themes (such as her troubled relationship with her daughter Julie). In understanding this remarkable woman, her under-valued paintings, and her striking memoir, Haroche-Bouzinac has become—through this matchless volume—an essential guide.