The queen, who had died on the guillotine in Paris in 1793, is depicted wearing a simple muslin shift reminiscent of the one she wore on her way to execution, its whiteness symbolizing her innocence and martyrdom. Executed on a small wooden panel with a highly polished finish reminiscent of a 17th-century Dutch cabinet picture, this portrait of Marie Antoinette was painted posthumously and entirely from memory near the end of the artist’s stay in the Russian capital of Saint Petersburg. The present painting is the most personal and poignant testimony of the relationship between Vigée Le Brun and her tragic Queen. Although personally disruptive and unsettling, her years in exile were professionally successful and highly productive as she travelled through Italy, Austria, Russia, Germany, England and Switzerland, welcomed into each European court as a revered survivor of the final days of the Ancien Régime and showered with commissions from foreign aristocrats and fellow refugees alike. On 6 October, as the mobs were invading Versailles to bring the royal family back to Paris, she fled France in one of the first waves of emigration, departing for Rome with her daughter and governess, in what would be the start of a twelve-year exile. When the Revolution erupted violently in July 1789, Vigée Le Brun fell into a depression and sought refuge in the homes of relatives.
It is through these imperious but affectionate royal images crafted by Vigée Le Brun that most of Marie Antoinette’s subjects would have recognized her and posterity remembers her still.Īs the painter’s career had been made by her intimate association with Marie Antoinette and the Queen’s inner circle, so it was undone – briefly – for the same reason.
#ELISABETH VIGEE LE BRUN MARIE ANTOINETTE SERIES#
There soon followed a series of royal commissions to the painter that shaped the public image of the glamourous Austrian Archduchess: depicting Marie Antoinette wearing a fashionable chemise (1783, several versions) – in which the informality of her dress was widely criticized as unseemly and caused an uproar with a rose (1783, Lynda and Stuart Resnick Collection, Beverly Hills) with a book (1783-1784 private collection) and, most famously, in a monumental dynastic full-length portrait of Marie Antoinette with her children (1787 Versailles) that was meant to improve the Queen’s image as a loving and dutiful mother and restore her deteriorating public reputation. It was owing to the Queen’s direct intervention that Vigée Le Brun was admitted into the prestigious Académie Royale in 1783, elevating her to the top of the artistic elite of France. Artist and patron were exact contemporaries, and starting with the success of her first full-length state portrait of the young queen in 1778 (Vienna), the twenty-three year-old painter established her international reputation. Few painters in history are as indelibly associated – both professionally and personally – with a single monarch as is Vigée Le Brun with Queen Marie Antoinette.
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