Exhibition Review Deborah Kennedy Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 50, Number 1, Fall 2016, pp. 117-120 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2016.0048 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/634565 No institutional affiliation (22 Nov 2018 08:05 GMT)
Notes DEBORAH KENNEDY, Saint Mary s University Exhibition Review Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755 1842): The Portraitist to Marie Antoinette. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (10 June 2016 to 11 September 2016). Other tour dates: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (15 February 2016 to 15 May 2016); and Grand Palais, Paris (23 September 2015 to 11 January 2016). Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755 1842) was one of the most famous artists of the eighteenth century, and in her example we have the story of a woman who was both successful and prolific during her lifetime, not a neglected female talent to be discovered posthumously. Vigée Le Brun is known to have painted over nine hundred works, the majority of them portraits and portraits of women at that. This major retrospective has a decidedly celebratory tone, marketed with what one imagines was a collective cheer of at last. It is unprecedented to have a solo exhibit of a female artist on such a large scale. One cannot overstate the historical significance of the worldwide attention it has brought to a new vision of female agency in the world of the visual arts. Opening in Paris at the Grand Palais in September 2015, and then moving to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in February 2016, the exhibition had its final showing at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa from June to September 2016. Some 160 paintings were on display in Paris, with around ninety in New York and Ottawa. Many of Vigée Le Brun s subjects were members of the royal family and nobility in her native country of France, but her fame was widespread, and when she lived in exile during the revolutionary years, she became a portraitist of international scope, with well-heeled clients wherever she lived, from Italy to Russia to Switzerland, with a brief sojourn in England. Portrait art of the eighteenth century was, of course, restricted to individuals and families who could afford it. Members of the rising middle class were having portraits done as well, but it remained a genre for 2016 by the ASECS Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 50, no. 1 (2016) Pp. 117 20.
118 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 1 the privileged. Vigée Le Brun commanded high prices for her work, and like the masterpieces of Gainsborough and Reynolds, hers were not simply likenesses but true works of art. The organizers of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada made great efforts to welcome the community, hosting a Vigée Le Brun Day on 11 June 2016. This featured not only well-attended tours or lectures by Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac and two of the co-curators, Joseph Baillio and Paul Lang, but also several hands-on events. These included live model sketching (with all materials supplied), as well as more leisurely sessions that capitalized on the current adult coloring book craze, where visitors could pick up a pencil and color in a page of Vigée Le Brun s work. Two coloring books of her paintings have been published to coincide with the exhibition (Chêne; Larousse), and this is surely another savvy marketing tool for promoting her work. The exhibition in Ottawa was organized according to the chronological phases in Vigée Le Brun s career, though the first objects on display were a series of self-portraits and a bust of the artist by sculptor Augustin Pajou. Along with several large gallery rooms, the exhibition included alcoves devoted to a timeline and other contextualizing information. On the way out, for instance, one could stop to view a specially made film about Vigée Le Brun s life, also available on DVD. Most impressive from an experiential point of view was the exhibition side room called Marie Antoinette s Boudoir. This beautifully designed room, all in creams and pinks and florals, provided a replica of her bedroom at Versailles, along with a demonstration of the art of getting dressed in the eighteenth century (with audience participation), starting with the chemise and topping things off with a wig and a hat. For all the books on eighteenth-century or Regency era fashion one might own, this was by far the best practical introduction to clothing of the period that one could hope to have. Due to the length and the success of Vigée Le Brun s career, the exhibition presents a new perspective on the eighteenth century, offering in effect a female gaze on France and Europe before, during, and after the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Among Vigée Le Brun s most well-known portraits are those of Marie Antoinette, and the National Gallery rightfully referred to her as the portraitist of the Queen, as she painted some thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette over a period of ten years, from 1778 to 1788. In 1789 at the onset of the French Revolution, as a supporter of the monarchy, Vigée Le Brun emigrated, later having to mourn in exile the 1793 execution of the Queen, a woman exactly her own age. Vigée Le Brun s portraits of the Queen confer a dignity and humanity on her regal subject, showing a woman in full bloom. They offer an important contrast to the politically inflected representations and caricatures of Marie Antoinette seen through the lens of the French Revolution, such as Jacques-Louis David s cruelly harsh black and white sketch on the day of her execution. As a lifelong Royalist, Vigée Le Brun and David were political opponents, yet prior to the Revolution, they were acquainted as fellow artists, and David (the older and more established of the two) offered advice to Vigée Le Brun. She was something of a prodigy in her natural artistic talents, taking after her father, who was a successful pastellist. She continued her immersion in the world of art through commissions as a portraitist and through her marriage to the painter and art dealer Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun in 1776. Nonetheless, as a woman she found it difficult to gain entry to the prestigious French Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, until her place was secured by the influence of the Queen in 1783. The exhibition succeeds on many fronts: humanizing the public image of Marie Antoinette (a rehabilitation also achieved by Sofia Coppola s 2006 film), and effectively using a global platform and twenty-
Notes 119 first-century bells and whistles to give extraordinary visibility to a new feminist narrative of an eighteenth-century artist. Key works of Vigée Le Brun were used to advertise the exhibition. In Ottawa, the beautiful half-length portrait known as Marie Antoinette with a Rose (1783) was the chief representative work and could be found on marketing material and gift items in the gallery shop. Its reproduction emphasized the darker shades of the background, wrapping Marie Antoinette in a swathe of blue tones on any number of posters, billboards, and even buses, her headdress sometimes peeking up above the horizontal border in a note of whimsy. With the Queen dressed in a splendid blue-gray gown and holding a simple pale pink rose symbolizing love, the portrait is an iconic representation of femininity and privilege. Here the Queen is all woman, soft and graceful, yet depicted with a regality that allows for an appropriate separation or distance between the subject and the viewer. In the gallery, the painting was placed next to an earlier version with the Queen in a white chemise dress, which had stirred some controversy due its revealing nature, and information was provided on their historical relationship. Two other portraits of the Queen dominated the exhibition by virtue of both their enormous size and their significance. These large-scale paintings done in oil on canvas in a grand style represent different moments in the history of her queenship. The first is Marie Antoinette in Court Dress (1778), a triumphant portrait of the Queen at her most majestic, even ceremonial, in an ivory and taupe gown with wide panniers. Adorned with expensive ribbons and gold tassels, the dress softly envelops the Queen, who appears to be floating in regal perfection. The second painting, Marie Antoinette and Her Children, done in 1787 to emphasize the Queen s maternal role, is another masterpiece. The Queen is in a red velvet gown with her three children around her and the empty cradle of her late child to the side. The red gown symbolizes her fertility, and the scene commands respect for a woman who had fulfilled both her public duty in providing an heir to the throne and her private duty in being a loving mother. Particularly noteworthy is the placement of her eldest child, her daughter Marie-Thérèse, who leans into her mother s body, finding comfort in this closeness. Marie-Thérèse s red dress mimics that of her mother, and from the perspective of history this chef d oeuvre carries a distinct poignancy in that she was the only person in the painting to survive the revolutionary years. Vigée Le Brun is arguably best known for two other paintings that depict the mother-child relationship. These are her self-portraits with her daughter: Self- Portrait with Julie (1787), also known as Maternal Tenderness; and Self-Portrait with Julie (1789), or Self-Portrait à la Grecque. Perhaps her most famous works, these universally appealing images have been often copied and reproduced on any number of items from decorative prints to chinaware. Unfortunately, the motherdaughter portraits were only shown in the Paris segment of the exhibition; but, nonetheless, the theme is represented in the full-length group portrait of Marie Antoinette and her Children, the centerpiece of the exhibition in all three locations. Moreover, four other self-portraits (with the artist by herself) were placed at the beginning of the exhibition in Ottawa. Displaying them all in a row enabled viewers to follow Vigée Le Brun through the course of her career: her Self-Portrait with Cerise Ribbons (1782); a pastel in her Traveling Costume (1790); a Self-Portrait (1800) in her mid-forties with paint brushes and canvas; and a fine small head, Self-Portrait (c. 1808), aged fifty-three. She produced several pieces that show her with the instruments of her vocation, her paintbrushes and her palette. Unfor-
120 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 1 tunately, her dramatic Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782), held at the National Gallery, London, was not included, though a comparable piece, the Duchesse de Polignac in a Straw Hat (1782) was part of the traveling exhibition. The straw hat, the coloration of the sky blue background, the fashionable dress, and the forwardfacing pose make them mirror images of each other, and the Polignac was another of the beautiful pictures used to promote the exhibit. Collectively, Vigée Le Brun s self-portraits teach us a new way of looking at the woman artist in the eighteenth century through the construction and dissemination of multiple examples of her own confident self-image. Among her other subjects, several stood out, including some smaller pieces. Her sister-in-law, Suzanne, Madame Etienne Vigée (1785), is not conventionally pretty, but her personality shines through in such a way that she fills the space around her, beyond the twenty-two-inch frame. The color of her hair is softly grizzled, brown threaded with white. One becomes inquisitive about her partly because she seems so much like a real woman, whose energy fairly crackles as if no time has passed between 1785 and 2016. Vigée Le Brun was known for preferring to portray her sitters with their real hair rather than with powdered wigs. Not all of her sitters were young, and the portraits of Madame Adélaïde and Madame Victoire (1791), Louis XVI s two aunts of a certain age, matter-of-factly depicted them with gray hair and worn skin, which drew from some senior onlookers in Ottawa the compliment that one does not often see portraits of older women. Among the most captivating of Vigée Le Brun s paintings was the small portrait of The Princess von und zu Liechtenstein as Iris (1793). Again, the artist has a way with hair: this time brunette curls cascade down the back of her young subject, whose long-sleeved gown adds to a sense of modesty. In addition to these heads, there were several portraits of male subjects that also gave a sense of vivacity, some from the State Hermitage Museum in Russia, such as that of Baron Grigory Alexandrovich Stroganov (1793). The international flavor of her work is also paralleled in the many stories that Vigée Le Brun has to tell about her long and fascinating life, as recounted in her Souvenirs (1835 37), excerpts of which were used throughout the exhibition. In her writing, just as in her many paintings, she brought out the importance of a woman s perspective. Vigée Le Brun s ability to do justice to her female sitters by capturing a sense of exuberance and individuality is perhaps her finest achievement, and I will conclude by discussing two half-length portraits that demonstrate just this quality. The first is that of Baronne de Crussol Florensac (1785), whose picture is used on the cover of one version of the exhibition catalogue. Dressed all in red with black details and white lace, she has her back to the viewer, just barely turning around, as if we are interrupting her reading of the piece of music she holds in her hand. Her presence seems three-dimensional, as if she were about to speak to us. Rarely has one felt a woman come so to life in a portrait, and no reproduction can do it justice. Finally, although there were not many paintings in the exhibition from Vigée Le Brun s later years, one worth mentioning is that of the woman writer Baronne de Thellusson (c. 1814). She too is absorbed in her task, this time writing not reading. Sitting at a cloth-covered table, she is holding a sheet of paper in her left hand and a quill pen in her right. Pausing for a moment, she turns to look at the artist and viewer. Her expression tells us that she has other things to do: she is busy, she is more than a pretty face, and the same might be said of the artist, who captures not only beauty but also the depths of women s lives in her portraits.