The Vicomtesse de Vaudreuil

Object Details

Title:

The Vicomtesse de Vaudreuil

Artist/Maker(s):

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, 1755 - 1842)

Culture:

French

Date:

1785

Medium:

Oil on panel

Dimensions:

83.2 x 64.8 cm (32 3/4 x 25 1/2 in.)

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On an oval panel, a young woman poses in front of a landscape. Smiling slightly, she looks candidly out at the viewer.

The sitter, Victoire-Pauline de Riquet de Carama, was an aristocrat and her status improved when she married Jean-Louis, Vicomte de Vaudreuil in 1781. The artist Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun emphasized the Vicomtesse's status and refinement by carefully describing her fashionable straw hat, silk dress, and gauze scarf, collar, and cuffs. Displaying her learning, the Vicomtesse places her right thumb in her book to mark her place, as if she has been interrupted while reading. Vigée Le Brun adopted this obvious gesture, often used in men's portraits, to illustrate women's importance in French Enlightenment circles.

Provenance
1884 - 1905

Baron (Mayer) Alphonse de Rothschild, 1827 - 1905 (Paris, France), by inheritance to his son, Edouard (Alphonse James) de Rothschild, 1905.

1905 - 1949

Baron Edouard (Alphonse James) de Rothschild, 1868 - 1949 (Paris, France), by inheritance to his wife, Germaine Alice Halphen de Rothschild, 1949.

1949 - 1975/1976

Baroness Germaine Alice Halphen de Rothschild, Austrian, 1884 - 1975 (Paris, France), by inheritance through her estate to her daughter, Jacqueline Rebecca Louise de Rothschild Piatigorsky, 1975/1976.

1975/1976 - 1980

Jacqueline Rebecca Louise de Rothschild Piatigorsky (Los Angeles, California) [sold, Piatigorsky sale, Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, January 9, 1980, lot 95, to Wildenstein & Co.]

1980 - 1985

Wildenstein & Company (London, England; New York, New York; Paris, France), sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1985.

Exhibitions
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 1755 - 1842 (June 5 to August 8, 1982)
  • Kimbell Art Museum, (Fort Worth), June 5 to August 8, 1982, (Cat. 16)
Bibliography

"Principales acquisitions des musées en 1985." La chronique des arts: Supplément à la Gazette des beaux-arts, 6th ser., 107, no. 1406 (March 1986), p. 31, no. 187, ill.

"Acquisitions/1985." The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 14 (1986), p. 219, no. 127.

Jaffé, David. Summary Catalogue of European Paintings in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997), p. 131, ill.