Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun By: Jim Lane Self-portrait by Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun 78.5 X 68cm., 1800, oil on stretched canvas State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (Click on picture for more of (artist's) work.)

When we think of great portrait artists down through history, names like Raphael, Titian, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Ingres, Sargent, and even Van Gogh come to mind. All of them were males. When you think of great female portrait artists, whoa...we draw a blank. Those with very good memories might recall Rosalba Carriera, Angelica Kauffman, Judith Leyster, or maybe Artemesia Gentileschi. There are others, but none of them, or these, are at all in the realm of household names. For those really attuned to the feminine side of art history, perhaps you've noticed an important name missing; and probably the BEST female portrait painter of all time--Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun.

She was born in 1755. Her father was the respected portrait artist, Louise Vigee, her mother a peasant hairdresser. Both professionals, neither of them appear to have had time for her as a child. Elisabeth was shunted oft to relatives in the country until the age of five when she returned to Paris and began taking drawing classes from her father. He died when she was twelve but by that time she was well on her way to stepping into his shoes. In fact, she was so successful, that by the time she was fifteen, she was making respectable sums painting very respectable portraits, so much so that she was threatened with arrest for...get this..."painting without a license." She quickly joined the Academie de Saint Luc. She was nineteen. And if a lifetime store of some FORTY self-portraits are to be believed, Elisabeth Vigee was also very pretty, vivacious, witty, smart, charming, and talented. At the age of 21, at her mother's behest, she married the wealthy art dealer, J.B.P. Lebrun--something of a gambling playboy given to living off his family's wealth and later, his wife's considerable earnings as an artist.

Elizabeth was prodigious if nothing else. Her portraits of the French court, especially its female population, though somewhat stylized, were very much in demand and quite profitable during this period. (Click on the self-portrait above for one of her best group portraits.) She is credited with painting over 800 portraits during her 87-year life span, twenty of them of her best friend and client, Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France. The queen's influence (or more precisely, her husband's) was responsible for Vigee-Lebrun's acceptence into the French Academy in 1783 against the will of its almost exclusively male membership. But when the queen's fortunes fell into disarray in 1789 following the fall of Versailles to a French revolutionary mob, so did those of her favorite portrait painter.

Viewed as a loyalist, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun was forced to flee with her nine-year-old daughter, Julie, first to Rome, then Austria, and finally to St. Petersburg, painting hundreds of portraits along the way. Despite her immense popularity all over Europe, her life was not without discord however. Against her wishes, her daughter married a Russian nobleman, while back home, because of her close ties to the monarchy, she was branded an emigre by the revolutionary French government, subject to arrest if she should return to her homeland. As a result, her dismal excuse for a husband divorced her to protect his property from seizure.

Twelve years she spent in exile, allowed to return in 1801 only after a petition signed by 255 international artists was presented to the French government. She continued painting prodigiously after her repatriation, her work becoming an important influence for a new breed of Neoclassical artist such as Jacques-Louis David and his student, Jean-Auguste Ingres. David noted, when Vigee-Lebrun's work was compared along side his own, that her portrait appeared to have been done by a man, while his own looked like that of a woman. She took this as the greatest of compliments. She died in 1842 at the age of 87, leaving behind an autobiography and a virtual "how to" treatise on portrait painting. No less a portrait expert than Sir Joshua Reynolds termed her "...the equal of any portrait artist living or dead, including," he added with some emphasis, "Sir Anthony van Dyck," (the Flemish portrait idol of the day).

Jim Lane is fifty-ish, balding, bearded, bespectacled, professorial, outgoing, knowlegable about a lot of things, expert on a very few. He grew up in the small town of Stockport, situated on the Muskingum River in Southeastern Ohio. He graduated from a un-noteworthy business college in Cincinnati, from the U.S. Air Force, and from Ohio University where he also obtained a masters degree and wracked up several hours of post-graduate work as well. For most of his professional life he's run a portrait business out of his home, specializing in sports portraits done in pencil and colored pencil.

Happily married for 30 years, Jim taught elementary and high school art for 26 years and also spent many enjoyable hours in the front of a local community college classroom. Recently he has retired from teaching in favor of painting, traveling, writing, designing web pages, and "...doing things I've never done before."

E-mail Jim at: jimlane@jimlaneart.com

Visit The Jim Lane Collection at:   http://www.jimlaneart.com

Or Jim Lane's Arty-fact Archives at:   http://www.1st.net/users/jimlane/Archive.html