Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun

1755-1842 • French • Painter • Rococo

"Happy as I was at the idea of becoming a mother, after nine months of pregnancy, I was not in the least prepared for the birth of my baby. The day my daughter was born, I was still in the studio, trying to work on my Venus Binding the Wings of Cupid in the intervals between labor pains." -Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun

The cult of love and feminine beauty were intimately bound to ROCOCO aesthetics. Vigee-Lebrun was unlucky in love (she married a man "whose overwhelming passion for extravagant women, combined with a love of gambling, decimated both his fortune and my own," as she wrote in her memoirs ), though amply favored in her looks. She painted self-portraits many times, as well as portraits of her children. Her father was her teacher, though he had died by the time she was 13. Successful at portraiture especially, Vigee-Lebnm was appointed court artist to Queen Marie Antoinette and her services were enlisted in the effort to counteract the queen's scandalous reputation as a loose woman. In Portrait of Marie Antoinette with Her Children (1787) the monarch, with an infant on her lap and two children at either side, carries allusions to paintings of the Madonna and Child. There is a Rococo "prettiness" in her pictures, and a freshness that is very much her own. Vigee-Lebrun's income was substantial but squandered, first by her mother's second husband, then by her own husband, a dissolute art dealer who charged high prices for his wife's pictures and pocketed most of her earnings. To increase her income, he suggested she take pupils, which she did, although, as she wrote, it "took me away from my own work and irritated me sharply." One student was Marie Guillemine BENOIST. Vigee-Lebrun left Paris during the Revolution, as the queen was taken from VERSAILLES under armed guard. She returned to Paris in 1802, but continued to travel as she had done earlier.