🖌️🎨The 18th-century French portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842; Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun)

 🖌️🎨The 18th-century French portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842; Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun), a beauty and a calculating careerist, was sincerely adored by Queen Marie Antoinette and loathed by Empress Catherine II. The artist’s biography will make it clear why.

Marie Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was born in 1755 to a family of a not very successful and not very wealthy artist, Louis Vigée, who came from the bourgeois “lower classes”. The girl began to draw almost from infancy. Her father guided her first steps, but, unfortunately, died quite early. Her mother, who had a quarrelsome and cruel character, soon remarried, and sent the very young Elizabeth – out of sight – to learn to draw and earn her own bread.
The paintings and drawings of Elizabeth Vigée had one valuable quality – they were pleasing to the public at first sight. By the age of 16, she already had regular customers. Moreover, some particularly nimble admirers specially signed up for portrait sessions in order to gain the favor of the artist – a cheerful and very pretty person.
Her frivolous appearance, however, easily coexisted with Elizabeth’s rational character. Coming from a family far from wealth and nobility, at the age of 21 she married for convenience a fellow artist, Jean Baptiste Lebrun. Lebrun was a mediocre artist, but an outstanding art dealer and swindler. The calculation of the newly-minted Madame Vigée-Lebrun was justified: not only did the number of orders increase, but so did the rank of customers. Now Elizabeth is invited to paint literally "in the best houses of Paris", she is patronized by the wealthy de Verdun family and even some of the Bourbon dynasty.
Eventually, the clear and idealizing style of Vigée-Lebrun becomes in demand at Versailles. She receives an invitation to paint the wife of Louis XVI. Vigée-Lebrun will paint at least thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette - half-length, full-length, surrounded by children and others.
The last French queen went down in history with the phrase "They have no bread? Let them eat cake!" Of course, Vigée-Lebrun's creative style (too much molasses and not enough "bread" - living and real flesh) was to her taste. Marie Antoinette made Elizabeth her companion, they became inseparable, together they took promenades in the palace garden, had fun and even sang duets.
Isn't it strange that Vigée-Lebrun, a mere representative of the "third estate" by social status, was suddenly awarded such an honor, an almost intimate closeness to the monarchy? Nothing surprising if we remember that the "Austrian" Marie Antoinette was always perceived in France as an outsider and felt accordingly. She needed sympathizers. And Vigée-Lebrun knew how to flatter so subtly - both in words and especially with her vignette painting. Vigée-Lebrun kept diaries all her life. Some of her lengthy memoirs have been published. And although they are usually characterized as "extremely feminine" (read: egocentric and superficial), a number of valuable observations about her contemporaries can still be gleaned from Vigée-Lebrun's notes. "A cloying dithyramb and a little poison" - this is how one can describe the characteristics that she handed out left and right. About Marie Antoinette, for example, Vigée-Lebrun wrote: "The Queen is tall and wonderfully built, although a little plump."
The bloody dawn of the French bourgeois revolution was breaking, great upheavals were approaching. Vigée-Lebrun finished painting the portrait of Madame Du Barry, the favorite of Louis XV, to the sounds of thundering cannonade. It was not yet clear what would happen next, and few people guessed that both Du Barry and Marie Antoinette would face, if not the gallows, then the guillotine. But the sensitive Vigée-Lebrun was already packing her things. Under the pretext that she needed to immediately save her teenage daughter Jeanne-Julie, she hastily left France.
Thus began the story of Vigée-Lebrun's long, but by no means painful, wanderings throughout Europe, from Holland to Austria. 

The artist's fame preceded her, since many of those she knew in Paris also left rebellious France. And self-portraits with her daughter (1, 2), who soon threatened to surpass her mother in beauty, served as the artist's best advertisement. In addition to noble or simply rich ladies eager to immortalize themselves in art, she also painted many royal persons: the Dutch monarch Willem I, the last king of Poland Stanislav Poniatowski, and members of the Russian imperial family.
But complimentary female portraits still predominate. And it is unlikely that Vigée-Lebrun was prone to painful creative searches. "Portrait of Marquise Gabriella Rolland", "Portrait of Countess Varvara Golovina", "Portrait of Countess Ekaterina Skavronskaya" and even "Portrait of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Alexeyevna"... 

If they differ significantly from each other in anything, it is only in their outfits - the Parisian Madame Elizabeth understood this, she cut it herself, invented models and established fashions. But these perfectly correct and surprisingly similar faces with a magnificent oval! But their uniform expression of a slightly bored beauty with wide-open eyes!