The catalogue — portraits in chronological order, each with a commentary.
230 works by the painter and workshop · 11 copies and works after · 35,602 words of commentary · Part 1 of 7 · 1773–1782
Every painting by Vigée Le Brun recorded on Wikidata with an image, in chronological order — the Paris portraits of the 1770s and 80s, the thirty Marie Antoinettes, the exile's work in Italy, Vienna, Russia, Berlin and London, and the long Restoration coda. Her own list in the Souvenirs counts 662 portraits and some 200 landscapes; Joseph Baillio's catalogue is the modern authority. Wikidata's dates are sometimes approximate and its titles often the museums'; the entries correct and identify where they can. What the catalogue shows above all is a manner — the three-quarter turn, the direct glance, the parted lips, the hat, the shawl — applied with extraordinary consistency to the faces of the European ancien régime in its last generation.
The Artist's Brother (Saint Louis Art Museum): Étienne Vigée (1758–1820), at about fifteen, in a schoolboy's coat with a portfolio — the future playwright and Almanach des Muses editor, the painter's only sibling, whom she supported through his life and whose widow she provided for. One of the earliest oils, already with the turned head and the moist eye.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q135659123 Wikipedia (fr)
Oil on canvas, 80 × 65 cm — Musée Fabre, Montpellier. A young woman in a white tunic with a laurel wreath, a lyre at her side, looking upward in the Greuzian manner: an early allegory of the kind the nineteen-year-old painter made for the market and for practice, before the portrait commissions took over, and the best surviving evidence of the manner's first model.
The face is the Greuze 'head of expression' — the eyes raised and moist, the lips parted, the complexion lit from the upper left — transposed into an allegorical half-length; the source is the têtes d'expression that Greuze sold in quantity in the 1760s and 70s and that the young Vigée had seen in the dealers' shops of the rue Saint-Honoré. What is already her own is the skin: thin, luminous, pink over a light ground, with the lake glaze at the lips — the recipe she would describe in the Conseils. The allegory is slight; the head is the point.
The Souvenirs describe the years 1773–76 as those in which she painted 'a great many' small pictures of this kind — Innocence, Prudence, a Bacchante, Poetry, Painting — for sale through her father's friends and, after 1776, through her husband's trade. Few survive; this one, which came to Montpellier with the Fabre bequests, is among the earliest works in a public collection. It belongs with the 1779 pastel Innocence taking refuge in the arms of Justice at Angers as the record of an ambition — the allegorical picture — that the reception piece of 1783 would make official and that her talent never favoured.
François-Xavier Fabre, David's pupil and the painter of the Florentine exile, founded the Montpellier museum in 1825 with his own collection; the Poetry entered it through the museum's later acquisitions and hangs with the museum's eighteenth-century French pictures. It is one of a small number of Vigée Le Bruns in the French provinces outside the royal holdings at Versailles.
The upturned eyes and the parted lips — Greuze's — and the skin, which is hers; the laurel; the lyre's strings, painted with a single stroke each.
The allegorical half-length of a young woman — Poetry, Painting, Music, Innocence — was the stock of the Paris picture trade in the 1770s, sold by the dealers as decoration and bought by the bourgeoisie as an acceptable form of the pretty face; Greuze had made the genre, and the young painter's versions were her apprenticeship to the market. What makes the Montpellier picture more than stock is the evidence it gives of how early the manner was complete: the turn of the head, the moist eye, the glazed lip, the thin bright flesh were in place at nineteen, and the portraits of the 1780s would add only the sitter. Seen in Montpellier beside the museum's Greuzes, it is a lesson in inheritance — the pupil's head is lighter, the skin more transparent, the expression less insistent than the master's, and the difference is the one the Conseils would later describe as a rule: paint the flesh thin, over a light ground, and let the light come from beneath.
Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger (Cleveland Museum of Art): the sculptor Lemoyne (1704–1778), the portraitist of Louis XV in marble and the teacher of Pigalle and Falconet, at seventy, in a fur-trimmed robe and a cap — an old man's head by a nineteen-year-old, done with the Greuzian softness and shown, the painter says, to the Académie as evidence of her merit in 1775.
Marie-Louise-Adélaïde-Jacquette de Robien, Vicomtesse de Mirabeau (Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris): a young Breton noblewoman in a white dress with a blue ribbon, one of the early Paris commissions from the provincial nobility at court; the Cognacq-Jay's small group of Vigée Le Bruns, assembled by the Samaritaine's founder, documents the first manner.
Robert-Jacques Benet de Montcarville (Georges de Lastic collection): a magistrate of the Paris Parlement in his robes, half-length, painted at nineteen — an early male portrait in the Duplessis manner, of the class of sitters (lawyers, officials) who were the painter's first clients before the court.
Portrait of a Young Woman (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen): an unidentified sitter in a white dress with a rose, of the early manner — the Greuze head with the painter's skin. Caen's picture came with the nineteenth-century bequests and is among the provincial museums' few.
Anne-Charlotte de Lorraine, Mademoiselle de Brionne (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne): a daughter of the Comtesse de Brionne — the Lorraine princess whose family, the Souvenirs say, were among the painter's first great patrons at twenty — as a young girl; small, oval, a Greuzian head. Australia's one Vigée Le Brun.
Madame d'Aguesseau (National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest): a lady of the great legal dynasty — the d'Aguesseaus were the chancellor's descendants — seated in grey silk with a fichu, an early commission from the robe nobility; the picture reached Bucharest with the Romanian royal collection.
Countess Urszula Potocka, née Zamoyska (c. 1750–1808): a Polish magnate's wife visiting Paris, the first of the painter's many Potockis — the family that would follow her to Rome, Vienna and Petersburg; a half-length in blue with powdered hair. Private collection.
Madame Aignan de Sanlot: a Parisian bourgeoise in a cap and fichu, of the year of the marriage — one of the portraits of the financier class that the Le Brun house's connections brought; the sitter's husband was a tax-farmer's agent.
Mademoiselle Rosalie Duthé: the celebrated courtesan and dancer (1748–1830), the mistress of the Comte d'Artois and the original 'dumb blonde' of Parisian legend, painted in the year she became Artois's; the portrait is a half-length in the Greuze mode with a sidelong look. Private collection.
Préville in the role of Mascarille in Molière's 'L'Étourdi' (Comédie-Française library-museum): the great comic actor Pierre-Louis Dubus, called Préville (1721–1799), in the valet's costume — the painter's first theatrical portrait, and the Comédie-Française's record of its star; the Souvenirs recall Préville's suppers.
The Prince of Nassau (Indianapolis Museum of Art): Charles-Henri-Nicolas-Othon, Prince of Nassau-Siegen (1745–1808), the adventurer who circumnavigated the globe with Bougainville, fought for Spain at Gibraltar and commanded Catherine II's Black Sea fleet — in a red coat, the most swashbuckling of the painter's men, at thirty-one.
Portrait of a Young Woman (Musée Cognacq-Jay): a second Cognacq-Jay sitter of the 1770s, in white with a lace cap, the Greuze head at its sweetest. The museum's three Vigée Le Bruns hang in the Hôtel Donon's small rooms among the Bouchers and Fragonards of the Samaritaine collection.
Portrait of a girl, possibly Sophie de Bourbon ('Mademoiselle d'Artois'): a small girl in white — perhaps the Comte d'Artois's daughter Sophie (1776–1783), who died at seven; a child's head of the kind the painter made for the royal nursery. Private collection.
Portrait of a Young Musician: a young man in a grey coat with a violin, of the Hôtel Le Brun's musical circle — the painter's house had its concerts, and the sitter may be one of the Vigée family's musician friends. Private collection.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q19273465 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 92 × 72 cm, signed and dated 1778 — Musée du Louvre, Paris. The portrait of the marine painter Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), the painter's mentor and friend, seated at his easel with a palette and a mahlstick, turned toward the viewer with the look of a man interrupted at work. The first of the portraits of artists, and the first full statement of the pose that would become the manner's signature: the three-quarter turn with the head brought round to the viewer.
The Souvenirs record what Vernet told her: 'do not follow any system of any school; look only at the works of the Italian and Flemish masters; but above all paint as much as you can from nature — nature is the first of all masters.' The portrait is the tribute. Vernet, at sixty-four, was the most famous landscape painter in France, the author of the Ports of France series for Louis XV and a member of the Académie since 1753; his friendship gave the young painter her entry to the academic world, and it was at his house that she met the circle of Hubert Robert, Grétry and the Abbé Delille. She painted him with the instruments of his trade and with the informality she would give to Robert ten years later: the powdered hair, the open collar, the brush in the hand.
The turn of the body, the head swung toward the viewer, the eyes meeting ours, the lips about to speak: the Vernet is the manner's template, and it was shown at the Salon of 1779 (her first exhibition of a portrait of a man of note) with the Duchesse de Chartres. The critics remarked the likeness; the painter remarked, in the memoirs, that Vernet 'had his portrait painted by me with pleasure, and did me the honour of thinking it good'.
Given by the painter to Vernet; his family; the Louvre by purchase in the nineteenth century (1835). It hangs with the Louvre's other Vigée Le Bruns, and beside it the Hubert Robert makes the pair of the painter's artist-friends, ten years apart.
The eyes; the mahlstick's angle; the palette; the collar; the hair's grey. Then the turn, which is the beginning of everything.
The friendship was of long standing: Vernet had known Louis Vigée, and the Souvenirs record the painter's visits as a girl to his studio at the Louvre, where the Ports hung, and to his suppers, at which she met the society of the Académie for the first time. He was also her adviser in the matter of the Académie reception of 1783 — it was through Vernet and Vaudreuil that the Queen's intervention was arranged — and his death in 1789, a few months before the painter's flight, closed the chapter of her Paris apprenticeship. The portrait was engraved, and served as the frontispiece to the Souvenirs' account of the 'masters I did not have': Vernet, Doyen, Briard, Greuze, the friends from whom she learned by conversation what the Académie's classes would not have taught a girl.
The Louvre hangs the Vernet in its eighteenth-century galleries among the portraits of artists; it is a quiet picture beside the Self-portrait with Julie, and the quieter for being a man's face painted by a painter of women. The handling of the hair and the coat is broad, the face is precise, and the eyes are the best in any of her male portraits before the Robert.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q27981371
Oil on canvas, 273 × 193.5 cm — Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The first portrait of the Queen by Vigée Le Brun, a full-length in the grand habit de cour — a white satin gown with panniers and gold embroidery, a rose in the hand, the crown on a cushion on a table, a column and a drapery — painted in 1778 for the Queen's mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, and sent to Vienna. The painter was twenty-three; the Queen twenty-two.
Maria Theresa had written to her daughter for years complaining of the portraits she received — 'they do not resemble you' — and the Queen's choice of the young Vigée Le Brun, recommended by the court's connoisseurs and by the Comte de Vaudreuil, was a bid to satisfy her. The painter records that the Empress was pleased; the Queen, who liked the painter, ordered more. The commission made the career: from 1778 the painter was the Queen's, and the Queen's image was the painter's principal product for eleven years.
The picture is the most formal Vigée Le Brun ever painted and the least characteristic: the Rigaud-Van Loo-Nattier formula of the state portrait — the full length, the column, the crown, the drapery, the stiff brocade — done by a painter whose gift was for the opposite. The face is hers: the Habsburg lip, the high forehead, the complexion that she praised above any she had seen ('so transparent that it allowed no shadow'), given the softness and the slight smile that the formal apparatus cannot quite suppress. The dress is a demonstration of the painter's capacity for silk — the panniers' satin, the embroidery, the lace — which she would, in the 1780s, abandon for muslin.
The composition was repeated: a version at Versailles (the 1783 Court Dress in this catalogue), one sent to Naples, and studio copies. The Vienna canvas is the prime, and it is the picture Maria Theresa hung.
Sent to Vienna in 1778; the Habsburg collection; the Kunsthistorisches Museum since its foundation. Lent to Paris for the 2015 retrospective, where it opened the Queen's room.
The face against the apparatus; the satin; the rose; the crown on its cushion; the lace at the sleeves. Then compare the Queen en gaulle of 1783, which undid all of it.
The face is worth a paragraph, because the painter's account of it is the best description of Marie Antoinette's appearance that survives: 'she was tall, admirably built, rather stout without being too much so; her arms were superb, her hands small and perfectly formed, her feet charming; she had the best walk of any woman in France... Her features were not regular; she had inherited the long narrow oval of her house, and her eyes were not large, almost blue, with a look at once intelligent and gentle; her nose was fine, her mouth not too large though the lips were rather full. But the most remarkable thing about her face was the splendour of her complexion.' The Vienna portrait gives the oval, the eyes, the full lower lip and the complexion, against the dress; it is the painter's first attempt at the face she would paint thirty times, and its slight stiffness is the stiffness of the occasion, not of the likeness.
Françoise-Augustine Duval d'Eprémesnil (1749–1794): the wife of the parliamentary firebrand Jean-Jacques Duval d'Eprémesnil, the Parlement's hero of 1788 — both were guillotined in April 1794; the portrait of 1778 shows her in the court's grey silk. Private collection.
Madame du Cluzel (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres): a provincial lady in a fichu and a cap, of the painter's 1779 commissions — the year of the Salon de la Correspondance debut; Chartres's museum holds it among its French eighteenth century.
Antoinette de Saint-Huberty: the great soprano of the Opéra (1756–1812), Gluck's and Piccinni's Dido and Armide, the painter's friend, later the Comtesse d'Antraigues — murdered with her husband in London in 1812; painted here in an informal half-length. The Saint-Huberty as Dido, the Salon picture, is elsewhere. Private collection.
Louise-Marie-Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre, Duchesse de Chartres (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille): the second of the painter's three portraits of the future Duchesse d'Orléans, in blue silk with a fichu — the picture after the lost 1778 one that began the court career, and before the Bank of France canvas of 1789.
Documented work · 5 language editions Q19006513 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 102.5 × 132.5 cm, signed and dated 1780 — Musée du Louvre, Paris. The painter's morceau de réception for the Académie royale, 31 May 1783: Peace, a dark-haired woman in a dark robe with an olive branch, leads Abundance, blonde and bare-breasted with a cornucopia and a sheaf of wheat, by the hand. The picture that made her an academician, and the one by which she hoped to be ranked a history painter.
The Académie's statutes required a morceau de réception in the candidate's genre; the painter, advised by Vaudreuil and by the Queen's party, submitted a mythological allegory to claim the higher rank, and the Académie, admitting her on the King's order, received her without assigning a class — neither history nor portrait — which was its way of not conceding the point. The painting was shown at the Salon of 1783 with the Queen en gaulle, and the critics, who were occupied with the Queen, found it 'well coloured' and 'in the manner of the Bolognese'. She had painted it three years earlier, in 1780, as a demonstration; the date on the canvas and the reception are not the same year.
The composition is a Bolognese pastiche — two half-length allegorical women in the manner of Guido Reni or, nearer, of the Lebruns of the Grand Siècle, with Abundance's pose from the Flora type; the colour is the painter's own, warm and pearly; the flesh is the manner's. As a history picture it is weak: the figures do not act, the allegory is a tableau, the draperies are costume. As a demonstration of what the portraitist could do with two ideal heads it is accomplished, and Abundance's face is the painter's own type — the face she gave her sitters and herself.
The episode is the locus classicus of the question the essay discusses: a woman could be received into the Académie, but the rank of history painter — the Académie's summit, reserved for the painters of the nude, the antique and the state commission — was closed to her by the exclusion of women from the life class and from the Rome prize. The Peace is the painter's attempt to claim the rank from outside; its weakness is the measure of the exclusion. Her real history picture was the Self-portrait with Julie of 1786.
The Académie's collection; seized at the Revolution with the Académie's property in 1793; the Louvre since.
Abundance's face, which is the manner's; the olive branch; the wheat; the cornucopia's fruit, painted with a still-life painter's care; the Bolognese drapery. Then the Self-portrait with Julie in the next room, which is the history picture she could paint.
The Peace hung at the Salon in the company of seven other works by the new academician, and the livret listed it first as the morceau de réception; the critics' response was conditioned by the Académie's own ambivalence. The Mémoires secrets praised the 'harmony' and the 'freshness' and said that it 'would do honour to many of our history painters', which was the compliment the painter wanted and the Académie had declined to give. The picture's later reputation has been as a curiosity — the proof of an ambition the talent did not support — and the 2015 retrospective hung it so, with the Juno of 1781, as the painter's two essays in the grand manner.
Madame Lesould (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans): a bourgeoise in grey with a muslin fichu, seated — Orléans's Vigée Le Brun, of the years when the painter's Paris clientele was widening from the robe to the court.
Marie-Joséphine of Savoy, Comtesse de Provence (Versailles): the wife of the King's brother, the future Louis XVIII — a small, dark, unloved princess whom the painter made as pretty as she could; the Comtesse's portrait, with Madame Élisabeth's, is among the royal family's series at Versailles.
Portrait of a Dancer (Musée Cognacq-Jay): a young woman in a theatrical costume with a tambourine, perhaps of the Opéra's ballet — the third of the Cognacq-Jay's three, and the liveliest.
Portrait of a Girl (Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona): a young girl in a white cap with a fichu — of the first manner; the Barcelona museum's one Vigée Le Brun, from the Cambó bequest of French pictures.
Presumed portrait of Charlotte-Françoise Bergeret de Norinval (Musée Cognacq-Jay): a young woman of the Bergeret family — the financier-collectors of Fragonard's patronage — in white with a blue ribbon; the identification is the museum's.
Presumed portrait of Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de La Motte: a young woman in white, identified by tradition as the adventuress of the affaire du collier (1756–1791) — the woman whose forgeries in the Queen's name destroyed the Queen's reputation in 1785. The identification is unproven; the picture is of the 1780 manner. Private collection.
Ernestine-Frédérique, Princesse de Croÿ (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm): a Croÿ princess in white with a rose, of the Flemish journey's year; Stockholm's three Vigée Le Bruns came with the Swedish court's Francophile collecting.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q105731234 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 147.3 × 113.5 cm — private collection. Juno, seated, receives from Venus the cestus, the girdle of love, which Homer's Hera borrows to seduce Zeus; a Cupid attends. The largest of the painter's mythological pictures and the most ambitious, painted for the Comte de Vaudreuil in 1781 as part of the campaign, with the Peace of 1780, to present her as a history painter before the Académie.
The Comte de Vaudreuil — the Polignacs' intimate, the Queen's circle's arbiter of taste, and the painter's most important patron and friend — commissioned the Juno for his collection, which the painter's husband would sell in 1784 when Vaudreuil's debts required it; the sale catalogue, written by Le Brun, praises the picture in the terms that were intended: 'a composition worthy of the great masters'. The picture was shown at the Salon of 1783, the painter's first, and was received as the Peace was — politely, with attention reserved for the portraits.
The composition is a Boucher subject in a chastened manner: the two goddesses half-draped, Juno's peacock, Venus's doves, the Cupid, a cloud-bank; the colour is the painter's warm flesh and pale draperies; the figures are, again, heads of the manner on bodies of the academy. The Homeric subject — the wife borrowing the mistress's charm to reclaim the husband — has been read as a compliment to the Queen's circle and as a joke about the painter's own marriage; it is more likely simply a subject from the repertory, chosen for its two beautiful women.
Vaudreuil; his sale of 1784; private collections since; exhibited at the 2015 retrospective as the painter's principal mythological work.
Juno's profile; the cestus; the peacock; the Cupid; the cloud. Then the faces, which are the portraitist's, and the bodies, which are not.
The Juno raises the question the essay discusses of the life class. Women were excluded from the Académie's school and from drawing the male nude from life; the female nude was available to them only through other women's bodies and the antique. Vigée Le Brun's goddesses are draped to the waist and posed from prints; their anatomy is approximate where their faces are exact. The Souvenirs do not discuss the problem, but the Conseils advise the young painter to study 'the antique and the Italians' for the figure, which is advice that concedes it. The Juno is the evidence of what the exclusion cost and of how the painter worked round it: the picture's beauty is in its heads, its draperies, its colour and its peacock, and not in its bodies.
The 1784 sale of Vaudreuil's collection — conducted by Le Brun, with a catalogue of his writing — was among the great sales of the decade, and the Juno's presence in it beside Flemish and Italian masters was itself a placement: the dealer-husband setting the painter-wife among the old masters whose prices he knew. The picture has remained in private hands since and is rarely seen.
Anne-Catherine Le Preudhomme de Châtenoy, Comtesse de Verdun (Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki): a young Lorraine noblewoman in blue with a straw hat — the straw-hat type of 1781–82, a year before the Self-portrait; Finland's one Vigée Le Brun, from the Sinebrychoff collection.
Madame Du Barry (Philadelphia Museum of Art): the first of the three portraits of Louis XV's last mistress (1743–1793), at thirty-eight, in a straw hat with a ribbon — the Souvenirs describe the visits to Louveciennes, the retired favourite's 'perfect' complexion and her 'somewhat common' manner. The Washington version of 1782 and the 1807 third portrait are in this catalogue.
Self-portrait (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; formerly Sedelmeyer collection): the painter at twenty-six in a white dress with a plumed hat, half-length — the self-portrait of the year before the Straw Hat, in the Rubens manner she was about to adopt; the Kimbell's picture was the centrepiece of Baillio's 1982 exhibition there.
Madame Élisabeth of France (Versailles): the King's youngest sister (1764–1794), at eighteen, in blue with a muslin fichu and a straw hat — the devout princess who stayed with her brother to the end and was guillotined in May 1794; the painter's several portraits of her are the Restoration's icons of the 'angelic' Madame Élisabeth, and Versailles's is the prime.
Madame Élisabeth of France (Versailles): a second Versailles version of the Madame Élisabeth — the princess in a white dress with a blue ribbon, smaller than the prime — from the royal apartments.
Julie Le Brun at Two (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm): the first portrait of the daughter — a small oval head of a curly-haired infant in a white cap, painted with the tenderness the Julie series would keep; the smallest picture in the catalogue and, for many, the most touching.
Madame Du Barry (National Gallery of Art, Washington): the second portrait of the Comtesse, seated in a white dress with a straw hat and a garland of flowers, against a landscape — the Louveciennes picture, larger and more formal than Philadelphia's; the Souvenirs record the sitter's pleasure and the painter's reservations.
Madame de Moreton, Comtesse de Chabrillan (misidentified): a small oval head of a young woman in white, whose identification as the Comtesse de Chabrillan the catalogue records as mistaken; an autograph small portrait of the 1782 manner. Private collection.
Works retrieved from Wikidata (creator P170 = Q213163, with image P18); dates from P571 where present, otherwise supplied from the literature; locations from P195/P276; materials P186; dimensions P2048/P2049. Tier labels reflect how many Wikipedia language editions carry an article on the work. Images from Wikimedia Commons; click to enlarge, arrow keys to step. Fetched 2026-08-21.