by CHARLIE MORGAN
As a woman artist, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun had much to prove. She was working within the French Académie tradition, which during its 150-year legacy had admitted only 14 women. Whereas men’s artworks were seen as a product of their ‘genius’, women were important in the art world depending on their ability to become static models, their role restricted to the other side of the canvas. In her self-portrait at age 27, Vigée Le Brun refused to accept this reality.
While here the artist may look typically feminine to the modern viewer, her manner of dress would have certainly stood out to her contemporaries. She is decisively causal: the rustic straw hat plays compositionally with the scruffiness of her hair; she hasn’t powdered; her décolletage is loose and revealing. But if these qualities typically are a mark of the poor, she proves her financial achievements with the inclusion of those remarkable earrings. In short, Vigée Le Brun is courageously breaking down assumptions, but she does so in her characteristic style of effortless charm.
The artist also makes demands on the recognition of her artistic training: the self-portrait makes clear reference to Rubens’s The Straw Hat (1622) which was at the time one of the world’s most beloved portraits. A comparison between the works is telling. Vigée Le Brun plays with light and illuminates not the breast – as in the case of the Rubens - but draws the viewer’s eye from the palette to her gaze and again back to the viewer, in a cyclical play of object and subject. She insists upon herself a
s first, artist, and second, woman.
What’s remarkable about Vigée Le Brun’s work is that she explicitly cuts through the perception of women in French academy art: passive, shallow (and usually naked), and instead confronts her male audience within their own gallery space. She is looking out directly, unblinkingly at the art society and is saying ‘I’m here to stay and there’s nothing you can do about it’. Unfortunately, she was not there to stay – the artist was exiled from France in 1785 as result of her associations with her queen and friend Marie-Antoinette, yet continued to work as an artist, not letting her sex prohibit her development.
In her autobiography ‘Through the Flower’, prominent 1970s artist Judy Chicago identifies the relationship between Vigée Le Brun and Adélaide Labille-Guiard, an even lesser known prerevolutionary French artist, as ‘not for male attention, but for artistic honours’. This spirit of mutual support would encourage Chicago in her own feminist art ventures centuries later, such as the vital Womanhouse project. In the same manner as Chicago, Vigée Le Brun achieved her success due to her perseverance and personality, with a great love of work and intense ambition: a quality which has been essential for female artists in proving their worth alongside simply the ‘talent’ of their male peers.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun has, in my opinion, been unfairly overlooked by history. In modern times she has held the spotlight in only two solo exhibitions, despite her broad oeuvre of portraits. Her technical brushwork is as good as, if not superior to, many of her now famed contemporaries. What she brings to her work that her male counterparts cannot is a truthfulness that comes with her compassion for female sitters. She would encourage a conversation at her sittings, and in this way the works would become not merely fixed stills of the past, but rather warm tokens of a mutual relationship. The artist wrote in her memoirs ‘painting and living have always been one and the same thing for me’, and this bright and engaging self-portrait perfectly fulfills this sentiment.