The Woman who Won Paris (and Lost)
Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun won the hearts of France’s aristocracy, including Marie Antoinette. But it was their heads she should have been worried about.
By Tim Gihring
It’s 1793. Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun is at home in Vienna — her latest home, after living in Milan and Verona and Venice and Naples and Rome, all in the last few years.
She opens a letter from her brother back in France. Her face tightens. She catches her berath. King Louis XVI, she reads, has been guillotined. And so has Marie Antoinette.
Elizabeth sits with the letter, candles flickering around her. Thinking perhaps of the first time she saw the queen, when she was a young artist, invited by chance to a chateau. There among the gardens was Marie Antoinette with her ladies in waiting, “All in white dresses,” she would write, “so young and pretty that they seemed like an apparition.”
Or perhaps she’s thinking of the time, much later, when she was summoned by the queen to paint her portrait. Elizabeth was pregnant and missed one of their appointments, rushing over the next day to Versailles, unexpected, like a child late for school. The Queen was at her toilette, making herself up for a carriage ride. Elizabeth was so nervous she spilled her brushes across the floor, and the queen herself bent down to pick them up.
They got along well, the artist and the queen. Born the same year. Both married to difficult men. Both enamored of comic opera. Their sittings almost always ended by singing together.
The queen loved that first portrait — a full-length image of her in an elegant white hoopskirt — commissioned by her brother, the emperor of Austria. She ordered two copies, one for Catherine, empress of Russia, the other for herself.
The painting may well have still been in the queen’s apartment in Versailles when the mob arrived and the royal family was hauled away and placed under house arrest in Paris. When they were led to the scaffold.
The queen was 37. Elizabeth is 38. It’s been four years since she left France. And as she sets down the letter, she knows she won’t be going back anytime soon.
•••
Elizabeth’s father was an artist. Not the best of painters, not the worst of painters. But he was charming. Which mattered a lot at this time, especially in France, especially in the art world. And especially for a painter of portraits, which in the hierarchy of art was somewhere near the bottom with still-lifes and landscapes, because, supposedly, it didn’t require much imagination.
People seemed to hire him just to hear him talk. So he did okay. And the house was filled with artists and writers. He encouraged Elizabeth. In pre-revolutionary France, women basically had two choices: hitch yourself to a man or hitch yourself to royalty. And Elizabeth didn’t want a man.
So, she paid attention to her father’s art — but also his charm.
For the first five years of her life, she lived in the farmhouse of a so-called wet nurse, a peasant woman in the village of Chartres. At 6, she went to live in a convent — not as a nun but a student. Learning to read and write and sew and embroider.
Mostly, though, she drew: in the margins of her schoolbooks, on the walls of her dormitory, even on the sand of the playground during recess. And what she drew, mostly, were faces.
Once, at 7 or 8, she drew the head of a bearded man and showed it to her father. Who told her, “You will be a painter, my child!”
And then, when she was 12, her father died after swallowing a fishbone. Life isn’t fair, and the family knew it — like many others in France. But on his deathbed, her father told his children: “Be happy.”
•••
As a teenager, Elizabeth took art classes at the Louvre, and became completely absorbed in her work. She was conservative that way. She didn’t read novels, which were officially condemned as immoral. On Sundays, she went to church, walked with her mother and stepfather. (A stepfather she came to hate.)
She saw the courtesans lounging by the opera house and thought, “these kept women,” with their giddy manners and made-up faces, and resolved never to be like them. She would keep herself, thank you.
She was starting to earn money from commissions, even if her stepfather was pocketing most of it. He did have connections, and when he moved the family to a more prominent home, ladies of the court passed by and sometimes stopped in. They would see Elizabeth painting a portrait and ask her to do the same for them.
Elizabeth may or may not have been a happy teenager. But she was, in her own words, pretty. And charm mattered, right. Looks mattered. And eventually, among all the older men who dropped in to see her, there was a young man coming around: Jean Baptiste Pierre. An art dealer, seven years older. When he proposed, Elizabeth was 20, with an income of her own and no particular interest in marriage.
But her mother believed him to be rich. And she did what mothers sometimes do. And so, Elizabeth said yes.
On the way to the church, apparently, she hesitated. “Shall I say yes, shall I say no?” she later recounted. “Alas, I said yes, and exchanged my troubles for other troubles.”
•••
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun being an art dealer is perhaps what persuaded her. But he wasn’t rich. He didn’t own the house he suggested he did. In fact, he coveted her prospects.
He asked her to take on students, to make more money for him to gamble, even though she didn’t like the idea. Young women began to appear at her studio, ready to learn. Her own work had to fit in between appointments.
She became so busy, focused on painting, that even when she was about to give birth to her only child, she didn’t leave her easel. Not until the labor pains literally overwhelmed her. She gave birth, it seems, right there in her studio.
It was right around this time that Elizabeth painted Marie Antoinette for the first time. And they got on so well that the queen saw to it that Elizabeth became her official portrait artist.
Versaille was a palace of rumor. And no one was more rumored about than Marie Antoinette, who was said to be a promiscuous, orgy-hosting lesbian stealing money from her brother — and telling poor people to eat cake. Even though it seems she did none of those things. And what she apparently said was “let them eat an egg-based bread” — which was richer and nicer than what most people were eating.
Elizabeth made her look good, out of empathy or self-interest or just charm. She depicted the queen with a book, for instance. Or with her children — including one she lost, represented by an empty cradle.
Elizabeth wasn’t sure this maternal painting would go over well. She locked herself in her house and hoped for the best. But the court did like it, and it was hung in Versailles. Elizabeth was asked to present herself to the king, who told her, “I know nothing about painting, but I grow to love it through you.”
It was good to be the king. It was not always good to be the king’s friend, however. When the king and queen helped Elizabeth get into the Academie, rumors started up about her, too. That she was the mistress of the finance minister, whose portrait she painted and was maybe the most hated person in France after the queen and king, in that order.
Another rumor had it that Elizabeth didn’t actually paint these royal portraits at all — men did. When Elizabeth did get into the Academy, along with another female artist — who didn’t have quite the regal helping hand — people said they were rivals.
Elizabeth was bothered, but not that bothered. Some artists, she wrote, “would not forgive me for being the fashion, and selling my pictures at better prices than theirs.”
She was going to have cake, in other words, and eat it, too.
•••
Elizabeth was ambitious, there was no doubt about that. She began a salon in her home, to drum up business for herself and her husband. After painting all day, she would take a light meal and a nap then host an evening of poetry and music. The room would fill up with aristocracy, looking for a good night out — and maybe a portrait.
One night, when Elizabeth had fallen for the neoclassical rage around all things ancient and Greek, she asked her guests to come in Greek-like attire. The women in loose clothes, the men in togas and laurel wreathes instead of wigs. She served old wines from Cyprus in ancient vases.
It’s the kind of thing people were starting to sharpen their pitchforks over, especially since it was rumored to have cost around 20,000 francs for the dinner alone. When the rumor traveled to Russia and Rome, the cost ballooned to 80,000 francs.
The guests liked it enough that they begged Elizabeth to repeat the so-called Greek Supper. But she refused, later writing, “Although I was, I believe, the most harmless being that ever existed, I had enemies.”
•••
Elizabeth was hosting another salon, in the summer of 1789, when some of her guests were overtaken by a mob on their way over. People climbed onto their carriages and shouted, “Next year, we’ll be the ones inside!”
She and her husband had moved into more elegant quarters. But now there were men lurking around. Making fists at her, like some kind of Dickensian characters.
Elizabeth began thinking about Rome.
There were plenty of French expats there, even an outpost of the French Academy. And with the classical revival, it was the place to be.
But she was also ambitious and wanted to get through the next Paris salon. So she stayed. Even after the National Assembly abolished the rights of the old regime. Even after the streets filled with mobs.
Then, on October 5, a crowd of mostly women carrying pikes and other weapons invaded Versailles and carried off the king and queen. That night, soldiers broke into Elizabeth’s home and told her she better not leave, though two returned and suggested she really should go. Now. Incognito.
So, she did. She gathered a few items of linen, some coins, her daughter, and her governess. Changed into shabby clothes. And got into a stagecoach at midnight, leaving behind her work, most of her money and jewelry, and her husband. And of course, her country.
•••
Elizabeth climbed over the Alps at least partly on foot, in a romantic kind of spirit, wanting to feel the dust and cold. The impact of elevation on her heart. On the other side was Italy.
She was 34 years old. An exile.
At first, it was almost like a vacation. She settled into Rome with her daughter and immediately hit up the sights: the Colosseum, the pantheon, the Vatican.
“The satisfaction of living in Rome,” she wrote, “could alone console me somewhat of the sorrow of having left my country, my family, and so many friends I cherished.”
Some 20,000 people would lose their heads in the Revolution over the next few years. First the nobility and the priests and nuns and then the revolutionaries themselvs. And yet it could seem far away from Rome.
One day, Elizabeth was summoned by the French Academy of Painting, the Rome branch. And in a curious ritual, they presented her with the painting palette of a painter everyone revered, now dead. And in exchange, they asked her for her own palette. And so she turned it over, and was in.
•••
All of her life, Elizabeth had found it hard to sleep at night — she was so sensitive to noise. As a result, she moved around a lot. But abroad, it was even worse. She seemed to move one week to the next, like she couldnm’t quite settle.
She also worked, constantly. “Painting and living are the same thing to me,” she said. It probably helped to get her mind off things. She wandered the ruins of Rome by herself, like a good Romantic, until the whole emigre experience became kind of poetic. “We fix our gaze upon the remains of a triumphal arch, a portico, a temple, a palace, and retreat into ourselves,” writes a fellow refugee. “We are the sole survivors of a nation that is no more.”
She fell in with the same kind of crowd as before. The rich, the idle, the idle rich. And when that crowd started to shift toward Naples — a separate kingdom then — she went, too.
She rented a villa, looking out at the Isle of Capri. And soon enough, she was called to court. She painted the royal family of Naples, befriended counts and countesses and painted them as well.
She did some of her best work there, like a portrait of a composer who seems to be looking toward the heavens — for inspiration or approval — as he sits at the keyboard. She liked this one so much she sent it to the Paris Salon in 1791, even though the Revolution was in full swing and the salon wasn’t quite as prestigious as it used to be — it had opened to anyone.
It was Jacque Louis-David who made the biggest splash, the painter of the Revolution who would vote to execute the king and abolish the academy itself. He would go on to paint Napoleon crossing the Alps on his white horse.
But even he admired Elizabeth’s portrait of the composer, paying it the highest compliment he could think of, which is that it looked like it was painted by a man.
Elizabeth didn’t stay put for long, though. She traveled around Italy, and had just left Venice when France attacked. Napoleon sacked the city, his troops looting everything. Elizabeth had a lot of money in the bank there and Napoleon somehow knew enough to tell his men to spare it, but it didn’t happen. She had been added to a list of exiles, her citizenship revoked.Out of 40,000 francs in the bank, all that was left to her were 250.
•••
After Vienna, where she learns of her royal benefactor’s deaths, she moves to Russia. She presents, as always, letters of introduction to princes and counts and countesses, whom she paints in portraits like the one of Countess Maria Theresa now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
It seems like a charmed life, enabled by charm. Men invite her to stay at their castles, high up in the mountains. They write passionate poems about her. And then she leaves. It’s hard to know exactly why, but she keeps moving. And maybe that’s for the best. It’s the men she meets who want her to stay; it’s the women she seems to admire.
In Russia, she paints the granddaughters of the empress, Catherine the Great. And she is about to paint Catherine herself, but the day they’re set to meet, the empress dies.
By now, Elizabeth’s daughter Julie is no longer a child, and she meets a man connected to the imperial theaters in St. Petersburg, and she agrees to marry him. Elizabeth, unlike her own mother many years before, tries to stop the wedding. But Julie goes ahead with it, tired perhaps of moving, of always starting over. “As for myself,” Elizabeth writes, “all the charm of my life seemed to have disappeared forever.”
Elizabeth can think of nothing worse, it seems. She feels like she’s suffocating, even though it’s her daughter who’s getting married. “I could not find the same pleasure in loving my daughter,” she writes, “and yet God knows how much I still love her, despite her faults. Only mothers will understand me when I say this.”
•••
In 1802, with Napoleon is in charge, Elizabeth manages to have her name removed from the list of counter-revolutionary exiles. It seems like the time to go back to France, leaving Russia and Julie behind.
France remembers her. The press remembers her. Though it’s been 12 years, everyone seems happy to have her back. A comedy troupe even offers to stage a show at her house to celebrate her return, an honor she politely refuses.
But she’s not so sure about France. It doesn’t feel the same. Her old friends are mostly gone. Paris has been soaked in blood.
Elizabeth didn’t see it happen, but she could imagine the deaths of the monarchs she’d come to love. The king going first, Marie Antoinette 10 months later. Dressed in white. The executioner using a scissors to cut her hair. Then tying her hands behind her back and leading her to the guillotine. When she steps on his foot, by accident, she says, “I did not do it on purpose.” Her last words.
Elizabeth is too tormented to stay in Paris for long. She moves to a house tucked away in a forest, outside the city.
When Napoleon finally is gone, if not for good, and the monarchy is restored in 1814, Elizabeth imagines it might be like old times. She’s still in touch with the powers that be and they want her back, too: the celebrity painter of the aristocracy. She attends a reception for the new king, and he gives her his regards when he spots her in a crowd.
But, like Paris, the monarchy is not the same either. Its powers are largely stripped, its favor with the people tenuous. And soon one king after the next abdicates or is deposed until the idea is scrapped altogether.
Elizabeth’s daughter dies young, of syphilis, and her brother dies early as well, along with her husband, long separated, of course. By the end she finds comfort in her nieces and the few friends who have been spared. It is among these people, she says, that she hopes to “end peacefully a wandering and even laborious but honest life.” When she dies, in 1842, her tombstone is engraved with the epitaph “Here, at last, I rest.”
In her writing, you often find the phrase, “I settled in my new house” or something like it, “where I hoped to find quiet.” But she never does, right, as if the Revolution had broken a kind of harmony inside her.
Perhaps it happens the night she would long remember, the last ball she attended at Versailles with King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, a few months before the Revolution.
The queen was happy and asked a number of young men to dance with her. But all of them refused, Elizabeth would remember, so that the dances have to be given up. It didn’t sit right with her. It felt ominous somehow and short-sighted.
If you’re invited to dance with a queen, she believed, the proper response is and always would be to dance.
Abridged from The Object podcast, produced by the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
