Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun Biography

Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, French artist, the daughter and student of her father, the artist Louis Vigee, was born on 16th April, 1755 in Paris. In 1776, Lebrun married the known art-dealer Jeanne Baptiste Pierre Lebrun. She made an early and brilliant career: in 1779 she officially became a court painter of the Queen Marie-Antoinette, in 1783 Lebrun was admitted to the French Academy of Arts. ?Intelligent, diplomatic, resourceful, and independent, she remains a role model to women who paint, having won wide recognition for her skills and gained admission to academies long closed to her sex. Vigee-Lebrun was an extremely industrious and productive painter, she left more than 30 portrait paintings of the queen and her ladies-in-waiting, many self portraits, and a lot of portrait paintings of the European nobility. Her portraits are elegant and rich in color, very sentimental and idealized the model. But the evident difference of the models from their pictorial depiction did not embarrass the customers. Vigee-Lebrun was fashionable with the European aristocracy. Her fame grew even more with her immigration during the French Revolution first to Italy (1789-93), then to Vienna (1793-94), and then to St. Petersburg (1795-1802), where she also spent 6 very successful years painting portraits of Russian aristocrats. In her best paintings the magnificent art of French portraitists of the 18th century and fine sensitiveness of the European sentimentalism are happily united.