The Woman Who Painted Marie-Antoinette

Elisabeth Louise Vigée (1755–1842) was strolling the flower-perfumed grounds of Marly-le-Roi, a royal country estate west of Paris, the first time she saw Marie-Antoinette (1755–1793) with her own eyes.

Vigée, about 13 or 14 years old at the time, was accompanied by her friend Suzanne, who wanted to cheer her up during a boring weekend at Vigée’s stepfather’s country cottage. As the two girls explored the estate’s pavilions, fountains, and canal, they saw Marie-Antoinette perusing the gardens surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting.

The teenaged Vigée could not have imagined then that the young woman she had just seen would become one of her most powerful patrons in her career as an artist. In 1778, about 10 years after that fateful day at Marly-le-Roi, Vigée Le Brun (after her marriage to Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun) became a painter in the court of Louis XVI, and a quasi-official artist to Queen Marie-Antoinette.

The remarkable story of Vigée Le Brun’s life as one of the most sought-after portrait artists in 18th-century Europe is the focus of the new Getty Publications book Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun by Jordana Pomeroy. The book reveals how the relationship between Vigée Le Brun and Marie-Antoinette began as an exhilarating adventure but ended in tragedy. Read on for a summary of their story, which you can explore in greater detail in the book.

Portrait artist to the stars

As a young artist, Vigée Le Brun displayed a knack for portraiture. She deftly and sensitively captured the human form and included clues to indicate her subjects’ professions, hobbies, and social standing. She also quickly learned that wining and dining members of French society and keeping an active social calendar helped facilitate connections and clients. She created portraits for counts, countesses, duchesses, and officials from the royal court that strategically emphasized the identities they wanted to display to the world.

This reputation earned her an invitation to paint the 23-year-old Marie-Antoinette. She would go on to create more than 30 portraits of the queen over a period of about 10 years. These works served to project qualities that the palace wanted to convey to her subjects; for example, her authority, elegance, devotion to motherhood, and success in providing two male heirs to the throne.

Vigée Le Brun’s portraits were the focus of intense scrutiny and judgment that varied depending on the public’s opinion of the queen. In one work, Vigée Le Brun depicted Marie-Antoinette in a casual, comfortable muslin dress—a new fashion the queen enjoyed as a more relaxed alternative to her heavier, more formal gowns. But when the painting debuted at the 1783 Paris Salon, people were outraged. Some said it looked like the queen was in her underwear! Vigée Le Brun quickly made a new version with Marie-Antoinette pictured in a more traditional, elegant satin dress.

A warm camaraderie

Despite Marie-Antoinette’s status as queen, and Vigée Le Brun’s position in service to her and the monarchy, the two women enjoyed a congenial relationship. The queen treated her painter with warmth and openness.

As Pomeroy explains in the book, Vigée Le Brun's memoir, Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1835–37), describes how their rapport developed: “The shyness I felt on my first encounter with the queen had entirely given way under the kindness she always showed me. As soon as Her Majesty heard that I had a pretty voice, she wouldn’t let a sitting go by without us singing duets...because she adored music even though she sang off-key.”

The two women also related to each other as mothers. Vigée Le Brun tells an anecdote in her memoir of Marie-Antoinette’s kindness after Vigée Le Brun missed a portrait sitting due to an illness during her second pregnancy. When Vigée Le Brun arrived to reschedule their appointment, the queen asked where she had been, and urged her to stay and work on the portrait then and there so she wouldn’t “have made this trip in vain.”

“I remember that in my haste to acknowledge this kindness, I grabbed my box of colors so briskly that I spilled it…I bent over to set things right. ‘Don’t bother, don’t bother,’ said the queen. ‘You’re too pregnant to be bending over.’ And no matter what I said, she bent over herself.”

A tragic end

As political unrest grew in France, Marie-Antoinette became a target for her subjects’ anger. Critics accused her of sexual misconduct, aggressive behavior, and extravagant spending. Vigée Le Brun’s proximity to the queen and the rest of the royal family made her a target too. One night in 1789, a mob of national guardsmen brandishing weapons burst into her home and told her she shouldn’t leave the country. After the gang left, two of the men returned to warn her that she should flee as soon as possible in a public coach so as not to arouse attention.

The terrified Vigée Le Brun heeded their advice and left France with her daughter, Julie, and Julie’s governess in tow. It was a wise decision: Marie-Antoinette was beheaded by revolutionaries in 1793, as were many other people with connections to the monarchy. Vigée Le Brun spent the next 12 years traveling around Europe, painting portraits of the aristocracy of Italy, Austria, and Russia.

She returned to France in 1802, though she continued to travel and paint even after that. She died in 1842 at the age of 86.

Vigée Le Brun’s tenure with Marie-Antoinette may have been violently cut short, but the artworks that resulted from their partnership survive as poignant reminders of these two dynamic women. Few female artists have found the favor of the aristocracy as successfully as Vigée Le Brun. No doubt her skill, passion, and scrappy disposition all helped her claim such an enduring place in art history—which Pomeroy expertly explores in her book.