Vigée Le Brun by Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer, and Paul Lang (review)

The first ever retrospective in France devoted toÉlisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, the prolific and successful portrait-painter, opened at the Grand Palais in September 2015. It comprised a vast 150 artworks, many of which were on public view for the first time. The vernissage at this prime venue on the Champs-Élysées was the kind of red-carpet affair that the artist would have enjoyed and felt was her due. Subsequently the exhibition—slimmed down to a still sizeable ninety works—transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery, Ottawa. There are several reasons why this event did not happen sooner. Vigée Le Brun, an unabashed royalist, remained very Ancien Régime in her sensibilities and approach to patronage as she toured the courts of Europe after the Revolution. Although she returned to France in 1802 and lived another four decades, she never adjusted to the radically changed environment. In the nineteenth century she was effectively written out of influential histories of art. Simone de Beauvoir, who might have spearheaded a feminist revival, dismissed her as narcissistic (Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), II, 631). Her eventual rehabilitation is in no small part thanks to Joseph Baillio, who organized the only previous monographic exhibition in Fort Worth in 1982, and painstakingly continued his research, culminating in this magnificent show. Recent years have seen the appearance of feminist studies (Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)), biographies (Angelica Goodden, The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (London: André Deutsch, 1997); Gita May, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); and Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun (Paris: Gallimard, 2015)), and several re-editions of the artist's Souvenirs (Mémoires d'une portraitiste, ed. by Jean-Pierre Cuzin (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Scala, 2003); Memoirs of Madame Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (Gloucester: Dodo, 2008)). The Met's catalogue, reviewed here, is smaller than its French counterpart, but no less of an achievement. Scholars wanting to see the fuller range of paintings, and additional essays, should look at the French catalogue, published by the Réunion des musées nationaux. The research is meticulously detailed and presented in an accessible, understated way. There is a succinct biographical essay, a crisply written overview of women artists' dealings with the Académie, and an account of Vigée Le Brun's travels. The real treasures, though, are the artworks themselves, generously presented in colour reproduction. Portraits have been assembled from public collections from San Francisco to Tokyo, and—this is no small achievement by the curators—a good third of the works hail from private collections. Alongside the familiar dramatis personae of pre-Revolutionary France (Marie-Antoinette, the duchesse de Polignac, finance minister Calonne) are lesser-known figures from the privileged classes of Europe. Vigée Le Brun's Russian portraits—long hard to access—are abundantly represented. One revelation from a private collection is the Princess von und zu Liechtenstein as Iris (1793), a vibrant and mobile display of red and green. The artist's drawings and pastels are justifiably given prominence; these include two charming studies of sleeping infants. Her Self Portrait in Traveling Costume (c. 1789–90) has a fleeting, almost vulnerable quality, a rare insight into the life she faced as an itinerant exile. A survivor in tumultuous times, Vigée Le Brun overcame many institutional and societal prejudices through sheer talent and force of personality. At last posterity has properly recognized her.