The Girl Who Painted Herself Into the Room

I taught high-school art for twenty years, and every spring I gave the same quiz. I would put up a self-portrait — a young woman in a straw hat, palette in hand, looking straight at you with the calm of someone who knows exactly what she is worth — and I would ask: who painted this? The guesses were always men. Every year, every class, always men. And every year I got to watch thirty teenagers meet Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun for the first time, and sit up a little.

I want to tell you about her the way I told them, because I have never stopped being a little furious, and a little in love.

Before you read another word, look at her mouth in that self-portrait above. Her lips are parted — you can just see her teeth. That was not charm; that was defiance. In eighteenth-century portraiture a visible-toothed smile was practically indecent — the kind of thing reserved for peasants, drunkards, and the mad, never for a respectable woman in oils. She did it anyway, more than once, and when she smiled open-mouthed at the Salon a few years later, one Paris gossip sheet formally condemned it as "an affectation which artists, connoisseurs, and people of taste have unanimously condemned." Imagine being scolded by the whole of good taste for smiling. She kept smiling.

A twelve-year-old with a dead father and a gift

She was born in Paris in 1755, the daughter of Louis Vigée, a pastel portraitist of modest reputation and, by her own telling, enormous warmth. In her memoirs — she wrote them near the end of her long life, and they are a joy — she remembers him looking at one of her childhood sketches and declaring, "You will be a painter, my child, if ever there was one." Then he died. She was twelve.

What does a girl in eighteenth-century Paris do with a gift and no father? She goes to work. By her mid-teens Vigée was painting portraits professionally — actually supporting her mother and younger brother with her brush. Think about that for a moment. Before she was old enough to marry without permission, she was the family breadwinner in a trade that had no intention of admitting her.

The guild that came for her brushes

Here is the part that made my students gasp. In 1774, when she was about nineteen, the officers of the Académie de Saint-Luc — the painters' guild — moved against her. She was practicing without a license, without membership, without having come up through the proper channels. The proper channels, of course, were built by men, for men; apprenticeships and masters' studios were not generally open to teenage girls. As the story is usually told, they went so far as to seize her painting materials. Her studio was, in effect, shut down for the crime of succeeding without permission.

What did she do? She did not stop painting. She applied to the guild itself — and they let her in. It tells you everything about her that the institution that came to confiscate her brushes ended up putting her name on its rolls within the year. It tells you everything about the institution that she had to be extraordinary for it to do the obvious thing.

And understand what "self-taught" meant for her, because it did not mean casual. Denied the apprenticeships boys walked into, she built her own academy out of whatever Paris would let a girl near: her father's pastels, drawing from casts, copying the masters wherever her mother could get her in front of them. Painters in her father's circle — Gabriel Doyen, Joseph Vernet — looked at the fatherless girl's work and gave her the only instruction she would ever really receive: advice. Vernet told her, she recalled, to study the Italian and Flemish masters but above all to follow nature. She followed all three. By her late teens her sitters included aristocrats; the fashionable world was climbing her stairs before the institutions of art had decided whether she was allowed to exist.

There is one more detail from those years that I can never leave out, because it is where the fury settles. The money she earned as a teenager — the money that fed her family — was not hers to keep. Her mother had remarried, and in her memoirs Vigée Le Brun writes, with an old wound's precision, that her stepfather pocketed her earnings while she worked. Even her wedding, at twenty, to the art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, traded one dependency for another: he was charming, connected, useful — and, by her account, gambled away much of what she made for the rest of their marriage. The most sought-after portraitist of her generation spent decades watching men handle the purse her brush kept filling.

I used to ask my students: how many merely good painters were lost this way? We celebrate the one woman who broke through and forget that the door was built to stop all of them. That is the arithmetic of talent in a closed room, and it is the reason I cannot look at her paintings as just paintings.

The queen in the muslin dress

In 1778, at twenty-three, she was summoned to Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette from life. The queen was almost exactly her age. Whatever passed between those two young women in that first sitting, it worked: Vigée Le Brun became the queen's painter — her favorite, her defender in paint — producing, by most accounts, some thirty portraits of her over the following decade.

The famous crisis came in 1783, when she showed the queen at the Salon in a simple white muslin dress — the kind of soft, informal thing the queen actually liked to wear. Paris was scandalized: a queen of France, painted in her underthings! The painting was withdrawn, and Vigée Le Brun replaced it with the version whose composition you see above — same pose, same rose, proper blue-grey silk. I love the pair of them as a single object lesson: the artist who knew the woman, and the court that demanded the costume.

She was, by then, more than the queen's painter — she was one of the personalities of Paris. Her evening salon on the rue de Cléry drew poets, composers, and half the aristocracy; she was young, celebrated, and famously lovely, which Paris forgave in a hostess and punished in a rival. The gossip found its masterpiece in the legend of her "Greek supper," an evening she threw with guests draped in antique costume, à la grecque, singing Gluck by lamplight. As the story spread it swelled into an orgy of extravagance said to have cost twenty thousand francs; by the time it crossed Europe, kings had heard of it. In her memoirs she sets the record straight with a housekeeper's shrug — the whole evening, she insists, cost her about fifteen francs. I believe her, and I note the pattern: a woman's talent gets doubted, and her dinner parties get inflated. The rumor mill never could decide whether she was too frivolous to be great or too great to be respectable.

That same year as the muslin scandal, she reached for the summit: the Académie Royale, the royal academy that stood above the guild she had once been forced into. And again a door swung shut — this time on a technicality. Her husband was an art dealer, and academicians' households were barred from the trade. The men of the academy had their rule, and the rule conveniently excluded her. What got her through, by most accounts, was intervention from the very top: Louis XVI, with his queen at his elbow, made his wishes known, and on the last day of May 1783 Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was received into the Académie Royale — one of only four women admitted at that time, alongside the formidable Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. The king's authority did what her talent alone had not been permitted to do. Read that sentence again and tell me the game wasn't rigged.

The night she ran

Six years later the world that had finally let her in caught fire. On the night of 6 October 1789, as the crowd marched on Versailles, she fled Paris in a public stagecoach with her nine-year-old daughter Julie beside her. She was thirty-four. Her patron was on her way, eventually, to the guillotine; the painter of queens was suddenly a fugitive from her own name.

And here is where I stop being furious and start being awed, because exile did not shrink her — it enlarged her. For twelve years she painted her way across Europe: Italy, where the Uffizi asked her for the self-portrait that still hangs there; Vienna; six years in St. Petersburg, where Catherine the Great's court sat for her and the empress's granddaughters posed for her; Berlin. Academies in Rome, Bologna, Parma, St. Petersburg, and Berlin elected her a member — the honors her own country had rationed out so grudgingly, scattered across a continent. She supported herself and Julie entirely with her brush, in courts where she arrived knowing no one. Meanwhile, back in Paris, her name sat on the list of proscribed émigrés until a petition from her fellow artists — organized, it should be said, by the husband she had left behind — had it struck off in 1800. She came home in 1802, to a France that had beheaded her world and kept her reputation.

Eighty-six years, six hundred faces

She kept painting almost to the end. In her Souvenirs she counted, by her own tally, some 660 portraits and 200 landscapes — a life's arithmetic she set down herself, so we may allow her the rounding. She outlived the ancien régime, the Revolution, Napoleon, and most of her rivals, and died in Paris in 1842 at eighty-six. Her tombstone at Louveciennes says, "Ici, enfin, je repose…" — Here, at last, I rest. The "at last" gets me every time. Even her epitaph sounds like a working woman.

If you want to meet her here on DiscoverArt, we are lucky: the Met's collection is rich with her. Stand a while with the Comtesse de la Châtre, painted the very year of her flight, all white silk and steady eyes. Or better — look at Julie looking in a mirror, her daughter caught between profile and reflection, painted by a mother who knew exactly how many ways there are to see a girl. Then walk through everything of hers in the gallery, and if you want the wider story of women painted out of the record, the editors here wrote a good one: 8 women artists history almost forgot.

What I tell the teenagers

Every spring, after the quiz, some student would ask me the question you may be asking: if she was this good, why hadn't I heard of her? And I would tell them the truth. Because for a long time, the people who wrote the books had the same reflex you had when you guessed. The guild that seized her brushes never really disbanded; it just became a bibliography.

But the paintings won. They always do, if we keep looking at them. A girl who was not allowed through the front door of her profession painted her way into the room, into the academy, into the courts of Europe, and finally — late, but not too late — into the story. When I stand in front of that straw-hat self-portrait now, I don't see an exception that proves the rule. I see the rule, exposed: the only thing those doors ever kept out was time.

She had eighty-six years. She used every one of them. Go look at her.

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Sources: Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Souvenirs (1835–37); The Metropolitan Museum of Art — "Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France" (2016) and collection records; The National Gallery, London (Self Portrait in a Straw Hat); Château de Versailles (Marie Antoinette with a Rose); the Mémoires secrets (1787), for good taste's verdict on her smile; Joseph Baillio et al., exhibition catalogue, 2016. Where accounts differ — the guild seizure, the king's role in her Académie admission — I've said "as the story is told" and "by most accounts," because that is what an honest amateur owes her.