Self-portrait with Her Daughter – Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
“Self-portrait with Her Daughter, Julie” by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun portrays the prominent French portrait painter who was a friend and favorite artist of Marie Antoinette. In 1780, Vigée-Le Brun gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne Julie Louise, whom she called Julie.
In 1787, she caused a public scandal when this painting was exhibited at the Salon because she was shown smiling open-mouthed, which was in contravention of conventions going back to antiquity.
The court gossip-sheet Mémoires secrets commented:
“An affectation which artists,
art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning,
and which finds no precedent among the Ancients,
is that in smiling, [Madame Vigée LeBrun] shows her teeth.”
Fortunately, Madame Vigée LeBrun’s career blossomed when Marie Antoinette granted her patronage. She painted more than 30 paintings of the queen and her family but was forced to flee the country after the arrest of the royal family during the French Revolution.
After fleeing France in 1789, LeBrun lived and worked in the major European capitals. She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers.
She was also elected to art academies in ten cities. Her artistic style was part of the aftermath of Rococo, while she also adopted a neoclassical style. Her color palette was Rococo influenced, but her style assumed the emerging Neoclassicism.
Vigée Le Brun left a legacy of some 660 portraits and 200 landscapes, and when she was in her eighties, she published her memoirs in three volumes, called Souvenirs.
Self-portrait with Her Daughter, Julie
- Title: Self-portrait with Her Daughter, Julie
- French: Madame Vigée-Le Brun et sa fille
- Artist: Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
- Year: 1786
- Type: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 105 cm (41.3 in); 84 cm (33 in)
- Museum: Louvre Museum
Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
- Artist: Élisabeth Louise Vigée
- Born: 1755 – Paris, France
- Died: 1842 (aged 86) – Paris, France
- Nationality: French
- Movement: Rococo, Neoclassicism
- Notable works:
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Painting royalty, fleeing revolution
A Tour of the Louvre Paintings
- The Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci
- “Ruggiero Freeing Angelica” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
- “The Valpinçon Bather” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
- “The Turkish Bath” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
- “Grande Odalisque” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
- “Perseus and Andromeda” by Joachim Wtewael
- Self-portrait with Her Daughter, Julie by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
- “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne” by Leonardo da Vinci
- “Louis XIV of France” by Hyacinthe Rigaud
- “The Massacre at Chios” by Eugène Delacroix
- “The Battle of San Romano” by Paolo Uccello
- “Virgin of the Rocks” by Leonardo da Vinci
- “The Death of Sardanapalus” by Eugène Delacroix
- “Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss” by Antonio Canova
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun
- “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugène Delacroix
- “The Arcadian Shepherds” by Nicolas Poussin
- “The Lacemaker” by Johannes Vermeer
- “The Money Changer and His Wife” by Quentin Matsys
- “The Fortune Teller” by Caravaggio
- “Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione” by Raphael
- “Charles I at the Hunt” by Anthony van Dyck
- “An Old Man and his Grandson” by Domenico Ghirlandaio
Marie Antoinette’s official artist, Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun
- “Vulcan Presenting Venus with Arms for Aeneas” by François Boucher
- “La belle ferronnière” by Leonardo da Vinci
- Self-Portrait by Élisabeth Sophie Chéron
- The Four Seasons by Nicolas Poussin
- “The Death of Marat” by Gioacchino Giuseppe Serangeli after Jacques-Louis David
- “Oath of the Horatii” by Jacques-Louis David
- “The Coronation of Napoleon” by Jacques-Louis David
Vigée Le Brun, Self-Portrait with her Daughter, Julie
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“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”
– Marie Antoinette
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Photo Credit: 1) Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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