She escaped the Guillotine in France to conquer Russia, how the exceptional Elizabeth Vigée-Le Brun imposed her style in exile.
Elizabeth Vigée-Le Brun, renowned first portraitist of French queen Marie Antoinette at the dawn of the French revolution is pushed to exile to escape the guillotine. She arrives with her daughter in Saint Petersburg in 1795. Against all odd this exceptional female painter which is a rarity at the time, French immigrant will established herself almost immediately as the new trend at the court and within the aristocratic strata. Under Catherine II, Russia is completing its westernization and French artists like Greuze and Largilliere are known and widely popular but Vigée-Le brun will have the deepest impact on Russian portraiture. She seems to impose her style and even her royalist nostalgia and longing for monarchy using a specific style against the new neoclassical trend that prevails in post revolution France. She not only produced more than fifty portraits during her seven years in Russia but also influenced major Russian artists like Vladimir Borovikovsky.
Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun in her memoirs described at length her deep love and gratefulness for Russia. Upon her arrival in St Petersburg, the city seems flooded with western Europeans and especially French artists and aristocrats in exiled from the Revolution. As a result, Vigée-Le Brun who deeply misses France, the monarchy and in particular the late Queen Marie Antoinette (to whom she was dearly attached) is finding her new home very much to her liking. Not only Russians are celebrating a lot of the artistic trends and fashion then banished in Paris but they welcome her and pay high price for her portraits. The reign of Catherine II is very ostentatious and the royal court seems as frivolous and luxurious as Louis XVI court would have been. In her Memoirs[1] she describes: “I used to venture into society every evening. Not only because balls, concerts and plays were frequent events, but also because I enjoyed these daily reunions, where I could find all the charm of French society for, to borrow an expression from Princess Dolgourouky, it seemed that good taste had jumped from Paris to Saint Petersburg in a single bound.”
In this favorable context, Vigée-Le Brun is evolving in a very familiar environment, meeting with her compatriots and making new connections with Russians who are very found of her work. She is constantly painting portraits for the nobility and the imperial family. She feels so comfortable with her style and its positive resonance within the Russian society that she even uses techniques from her past to create new portraits. This tendency seems obvious when placing her famous portrait of Marie Antoinette she did in 1778 (fig1) alongside the portrait of Empress Maria Feodorovna, made in 1799 while in Exile (fig2).
While contemplating both portraits, one can’t ignore the similarities. Both are full-length grand manner portraits, displaying the importance of the sitter. Both queen and empress appear in low cut gown with pannier against a backdrop of roman columns and drapery. The Rococo style is predominant, the light is fleeting over the surfaces, particularly the dresses, and the artist uses a lot of curves. The only difference is that instead of using the typical Rococo pastel colors, in the Russian portrait she uses a crimson background and lots of gold tones. She explains the reasons in her memoirs[2]: “ the Emperor (Paul I) had commissioned me to paint the portrait of his wife, the empress; I painted a full length portrait of her wearing her court costume and a diamond coronet. I do not care to paint diamonds; it is impossible for a brush to achieve that brilliance. Nevertheless, I placed the empress in front of a large crimson velvet curtain and this gave me the richness of tone I needed in order to make the crown stand out, and I think I succeeded in making it shine as much as possible.” Vigée-Le Brun noticed the attraction of Russians for Marie Antoinette, which could explain why she felt entitled to mimic some of her earlier work. She brought her portrait of queen Marie Antoinette from France, and exhibited it in her own home. She explains how delighted she felt to see the great interest it was to the Russians.
Twenty-one years separate the two portraits and no artist in post revolution France would dare using such royal attributes. France, at the time is lead by artists like Jacques Louis David and is influenced by Diderot’s ideologies of neoclassicism. They call for a new art, more serious with substance and their art are political statements. History paintings are more prestigious at the French Academy than portraits and call for virtue. In 1799, France is seeing the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, and painters like Vivant Denon or Gros are acting as reporters from the battlefield and art is used as Napoleon’s propaganda.
The contrast of style between Paris and St Petersburg is made very clear to Vigée-Le Brun upon her return to Paris, going to the theater she deplores seeing black heads and black clothes instead of the powdered wigs that everyone is still wearing abroad.
While Vigée-Le Brun talks at length of her encounters with French artists, she doesn’t mention in her memoirs meeting with Russian painters even though talents like Fedor Rokotov, Dmitri Levitski, and Vladimir Borovikovsky started to make their mark on the Russian art scene. Surprisingly, she also doesn’t mention well-known Russians poets as Pushkin, Derzhavin, Zhukovsky or Krylov who would have evolve in the same circles as hers. Until then, it was common for Russians to request international artists to do their portrait but this trend is starting to fade and Russian artists are becoming more in demand. While there always have been opponents to the westernization of Russia, the nineteenth century will see a strong return to national identity, a celebration of native Art and Craft and recognition of Russian talents in Russia and abroad.
In her style, Vigée-Le Brun was a great admirer of Rubens, she was a colorist and adopted a painterly style. She was famous for avoiding strict poses and court dresses (she made scandal in Paris by dressing Marie Antoinette in a chemise dress Fig 3); early on she liked dressing her sitter in clothing that freed the body, loose blouses, letting their hair down and unpowdered (Fig 0). She was trying to capture a more truthful persona of her sitter by adopting a more natural approach. Without altering her sitter’s likeness she would make her look more radiant, more graceful or more superb which explains why Vigée-Le Brun was so popular with women. She was also using a lot of dark or neutral backgrounds so the eye of the viewer wouldn’t be distracted by other details and the face and body would stand out more, popping out of the canvas and creating a striking effect (fig 3). By doing so she may have been a precursor of a more romantic style.
Vigée-Le Brun did not only influenced Russian art by producing an incredible number of Russian portraits or by entering St Petersburg Academy but also by leaving her mark on Russian artists. While it is unclear if they met in St Petersburg, the study of Vladimir Borovikovsky portraits reveals that he was influenced by her style. He adopted in his portraits similar outdoors settings, loose brushstrokes, capturing the beauty of the sitter in very relaxed poses. He also uses beautiful sfumato atmospheric effect in the background as she did (Fig 4 and 5). Both artists portrayed their sitter against a landscape, the background dense with Foliage. The sitters wear white tunics in the “Neo-Grecian” style and shawls. Their hair is down and their arms relaxing on a ledge with pink roses (flowers of love).
Vigée-Le Brun's time in Russia is little known and very few scholars studied this period of her life mainly because herself as an artist had a late recognition (a male dominated academy did not promote her talent). But it is clear that Russia had a tremendous effect on this resourceful, barrier-breaking artist and she left St Petersburg, her country of adoption, with great sadness. In return, she had left a great legacy to Russia, many of her paintings still in Russian private collections and recently making news in 2016 when Russia refused to lend some of her work (because of ownership issues) to the Metropolitan Museum of New York for a exhibition dedicated to her.
[1] THE MEMOIRS OF ELISABETH VIGEE-LE BRUN, p 178
[2] THE MEMOIRS OF ELISABETH VIGEE-LE BRUN, p 206
