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 2 of 7 · 1782–1786
Marie-Thérèse-Louise de Savoie-Carignan, Princesse de Lamballe (Versailles): the Queen's first favourite and the superintendent of her household, in white with powdered hair — the princess who was murdered by the September massacres of 1792 and whose head was carried past the Queen's window at the Temple; the painter's portrait shows a plump, gentle, pale woman of thirty-three.
Princess Élisabeth of France (Tokyo Fuji Art Museum): a version of the Madame Élisabeth type — the princess in a white dress with a blue ribbon — of the several the painter and her studio made for the royal family; the Tokyo Fuji's picture is one of two Vigée Le Bruns in Japan.
Documented work · 7 language editions Q18719540 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 97.8 × 70.5 cm — National Gallery, London, bought in 1897. The painter at twenty-seven, half-length, in a white dress with a black shawl and a pink sash, a straw hat with a feather and a wreath of flowers, her palette and brushes in her left hand, against an open sky; the light falls on her face from the sky, without shadow from the hat. The picture that made her name at the Salon of 1783, and the most reproduced self-portrait by any woman painter.
The Souvenirs give the source: in 1781, on a journey to Flanders and Holland with her husband — the dealer's buying trip — she saw in Antwerp Rubens's Portrait of Susanna Lunden, the 'Chapeau de Paille' (now in the National Gallery, a few rooms away), and 'its great effect lies in the two different lights, that of the sun and that of the sky... This picture inspired me to such a degree that I painted my own portrait at Brussels, seeking the same effect.' The Rubens is a young woman in a felt hat (not straw; the title is a misnomer) lit from below by the reflected light of the sky; the Vigée Le Brun is the same lighting with a real straw hat, and the homage is also a correction — the pupil has understood the master's device and made it simpler.
The palette is the statement. A woman painter showing herself with the tools of her trade, in a hat and a shawl, smiling, against the sky, was a declaration at the moment of the Académie reception: this is what I am. The picture hung at the Salon of 1783 beside the Queen en gaulle, and it was the one the critics praised without reservation — the Rubens comparison was made at once and taken as a compliment. Its fame spread by engraving and by repetition: a second autograph version exists (private collection), and the painter's friends ordered copies.
The flesh is the manner's demonstration: a pale ground, thin paint, the cheeks and lips glazed with lake, the sky's blue reflected in the shadows under the hat's brim; the dress is a broad wet white; the shawl a few strokes of black; the flowers on the hat are a still life. The picture is in excellent condition and the National Gallery's cleaning of the 1990s confirmed the handling as autograph throughout.
The painter's own; sold; in English collections in the nineteenth century; bought by the National Gallery in 1897 — its first Vigée Le Brun and, with the Mademoiselle Brongniart, one of two.
The light on the face and the absence of shadow; the palette; the smile; the straw's weave; the flowers. Then walk to the Rubens.
The Straw Hat has been the painter's emblem since 1783 — engraved at once, copied through the nineteenth century, reproduced on every book about her and on the posters of the 2015 retrospective — and it has borne the weight well. Its modern readers have seen in it the first self-portrait by a woman to present the painter as a professional without apology: no muse, no allegory, no modesty, a woman in a hat with a palette, smiling, in the open air. The comparison with Rubens, which the painter invited, has been made in every account since; the comparison with Rembrandt's self-portraits with palette is the one the National Gallery's hanging makes possible a few rooms away, and it is not to her disadvantage.
Self-portrait with Palette: a half-length variant of the Straw Hat composition — the painter with palette and brushes, in a hat — one of the autograph repetitions she made of her most famous image for friends. Private collection.
The Duchesse de Polignac in a Straw Hat (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford): a second version of the Versailles picture of 1782, in the same hat and muslin, with minor variations — the Polignac portrait the painter repeated for the Queen's circle; the Wadsworth's is the American one.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q21001124 Wikipedia (fr)
Oil on canvas, 92.3 × 73.6 cm — Musée de l'Histoire de France, Versailles. The Queen's favourite, at thirty-three, in a white muslin dress with a blue sash and a straw hat with a feather, against a sky: the same costume and the same lighting as the painter's own Straw Hat of the same year, applied to the most envied and most hated woman at court.
Yolande Martine Gabrielle de Polastron (1749–1793), Comtesse then Duchesse de Polignac, was the Queen's intimate from 1775, the governess of the royal children from 1782, and the centre of the circle — her husband, her sister-in-law Diane, her lover Vaudreuil — that the Queen's enemies called the 'Polignac clan' and that absorbed, by the pamphlets' reckoning, millions from the treasury. The painter was the clan's painter; she describes the Duchesse as 'one of the most beautiful women I have seen', with a face 'both angelic and lively', and she painted her at least four times. The Duchesse fled France in July 1789, the week after the Bastille, and died in Vienna in December 1793, two months after the Queen, of grief, it was said.
The picture is the Straw Hat formula — the sky-light, the hat, the muslin — and it is, with the painter's own, its founding example: the informality of the Trianon made into an image. The Duchesse had no palette; she has a hand on her breast, and the gesture, with the parted lips and the direct eyes, is the manner's intimacy at its most complete. A second version, with a music-book (Waddesdon, National Trust), is in this catalogue; the Versailles picture is the simpler and the better.
The Polignac family; Versailles's museum under Louis-Philippe; the Musée de l'Histoire de France since.
The hand on the breast; the hat's brim and its shadow (there is none); the sash's blue against the muslin; the eyes. Then the painter's own Straw Hat, for the pairing.
The painter's relation to the Polignacs was the foundation of her court career and the source of the pamphlets' attacks on her: she was the clan's painter, Vaudreuil's friend, the Duchesse's guest at the Trianon, and the Souvenirs defend the Duchesse at length — 'the calumnies that were heaped upon her' — in terms that were also a self-defence. The portraits of the Duchesse are the softest faces in the œuvre, and the softness is partisan: the painter gave to the most hated woman at court the look of the most amiable. The Versailles picture came to the museum from the family; it was lent to the 2015 retrospective and hung with the Straw Hat self-portrait, the two pictures of 1782 in the same hat. The museum's catalogue dates it 1782 on the painter's own list; the Waddesdon version with the music-book is 1783, and the two together show the Duchesse in the year of her appointment as governess and the year after. Both were engraved, and the engravings were what the pamphleteers drew on.
Documented work · 5 language editions Q19905205 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, oval, 92 × 72 cm, signed and dated 1783 — Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Bache collection, 1949). A young woman in a white dress with a blue sash, a music-sheet in her hands, looking upward with parted lips, her hair loose and powdered: the Souvenirs say nothing of her, but the sitter's later history made the picture famous.
Catherine Verlée (1761–1835), born in Tranquebar in Danish India to a French official, married at fifteen to George Grand, an English official in Calcutta, the subject in 1778 of a scandal with Philip Francis that ended the marriage, came to Paris in 1782 and became, by 1783, one of the beauties of the Palais-Royal; in 1802 she married Talleyrand, whose mistress she had been since the 1790s, on Napoleon's insistence. She was famous for her beauty and her stupidity — Talleyrand is supposed to have said he had married her because he needed one silly woman in a house full of clever ones — and the portrait, painted when she was twenty-two, is the record of the first.
The upturned eyes, the parted lips, the music-sheet are the Greuze apparatus applied to a grown woman; the painter used the 'inspired' look — the singer at the moment of the high note — for the actresses and musicians of the 1780s (Saint-Huberty, Todi, Dugazon) and gave it here to a sitter who was not one. The powdered hair, unusual in the painter's women of these years, and the blue sash against the white are the picture's colour; the oval format was for the boudoir. The handling of the dress is broad and the face is the manner at its most seductive.
The sitter; French collections; Jules Bache, the New York banker, whose collection came to the Met in 1949; the Met's principal Vigée Le Brun with the Comtesse de la Châtre.
The eyes rolled up; the music; the powdered hair; the oval. Then think of Talleyrand.
The portrait came to public attention in the twentieth century through the Bache bequest and through the sitter's celebrity: it has been reproduced in every life of Talleyrand as the image of the woman he married, and its Greuzian swoon has served the biographers as a character sketch. Its qualities as a painting are independent of this: the oval composition is among the painter's most elegant, the white and blue against the dark ground are the manner's colour at its cleanest, and the music-sheet in the hands is a small still life. The Met hangs it with the La Châtre and the Crussol-Florensac in the French eighteenth-century galleries, where it is the picture visitors photograph. The signature and date, at the right edge, are among the few on the painter's Paris portraits, and the year places the picture in the season of her Académie reception — it is, with the Straw Hat and the Queen's two portraits, the work of the summer of 1783.
Marie Antoinette in Court Dress (Versailles): the Versailles version of the Vienna Court Dress of 1778 — the Queen in the grand habit with panniers, the crown on the cushion — repeated in 1783 for the French royal apartments; the museum hangs it as the formal Queen beside the Rose.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q107053326 Wikipedia (fr)
Oil on canvas, 89.8 × 72 cm — Hessian House Foundation, Schloss Wolfsgarten (on loan to the Schlossmuseum Darmstadt / Hessisches Landesmuseum). The Queen at twenty-seven in a white muslin chemise dress with a gold sash, a straw hat with a feather and a blue ribbon, tying a rose with a ribbon, against a plain ground: the most scandalous portrait of the reign and the one that defined the painter's relation to the Queen's image.
The painter showed a version of this composition at the Salon of 1783 — her debut — and the response was immediate: the Queen in her chemise, her underwear, the critics said; the Queen in Austrian muslin, the silk-weavers of Lyon said, ruining French industry; the Queen as a milkmaid, the pamphlets said. The picture was withdrawn within days and replaced by the Queen with a Rose — the same pose, in blue-grey silk — and the painter's Souvenirs describe the episode with exasperation: the dress was what the Queen wore at the Trianon, and 'the malicious did not fail to say that I had painted the Queen in her chemise'. The robe en gaulle, a loose muslin gown gathered with a sash, was the Trianon's uniform — the costume of the Queen's private pastoral — and its appearance in a public portrait collapsed the distinction between the Queen's two lives that the monarchy's image depended on.
The composition exists in several autograph versions: this one, at Wolfsgarten, which descended in the Hessian family (the Queen's relations through Hesse-Darmstadt) and is the best preserved; one at Washington (National Gallery of Art, from the Timken collection); one in a private collection; and the Salon picture itself, whose identity is debated. The Hessian canvas was lent to the 2015 retrospective and hung beside the Rose replacement — the before and after of the scandal.
The pose is the manner's: the slight turn, the hands busy with the rose and the ribbon, the head brought round, the lips parted; the muslin is painted wet and broad, the hat's straw is a few dry strokes, the face is the Queen's with the painter's softening. It is, of all the Queen's portraits, the one in which she looks most like the painter's other sitters — which was the scandal's point: the Queen had been painted as a private woman.
The muslin's folds; the sash; the rose and ribbon; the hat's feather; the face. Then the Rose version, in which the same woman has put her silk back on.
The chemise à la reine, as the fashion plates called it after 1783, was a loose gown of white muslin or lawn gathered with a sash, worn without panniers or stays; it came from the Creole dress of the West Indies and the English taste for the informal, and the Queen adopted it at the Trianon in the early 1780s. Its portrait was a political object because the Queen's public body was the state's, and the state's body wore silk, embroidery and panniers: to show the Queen in muslin was to show her as a private person, which was what the Trianon was and what the nation was not permitted to see. The fashion itself triumphed — by 1790 every woman in Paris wore the chemise — and the portrait's scandal is the scandal of a style's first public appearance on the wrong body.
Documented work · 9 language editions Q3937618 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 113 × 87 cm — Musée de l'Histoire de France, Versailles. The Queen in a blue-grey silk dress with lace sleeves and a gauze fichu, a straw-coloured plumed hat with a bow, holding a rose with a ribbon, against a foliage ground: the replacement for the Queen en gaulle at the Salon of 1783, painted in days when the muslin portrait was withdrawn, and the most reproduced image of Marie Antoinette.
The Souvenirs tell the story: the muslin portrait having 'given rise to much malicious talk', the painter 'substituted another' — the same pose, the same rose, in a dress of silk — and the new picture quieted the critics, who found it 'more suitable'. The substitution is the episode's lesson: the Queen's image was a matter of costume, and the painter could change it in a week. The Rose exists in at least four autograph versions and many studio repetitions, sent to the Queen's relatives and friends across Europe; Versailles's canvas, from the royal collection, is the prime, and the Resnick collection's version (also in this catalogue) is among the best of the others.
The silk is the painter's satin — a blue-grey with white highlights laid wet — and the lace at the elbows, the gauze at the neck and the hat's plumes are the virtuoso passages; the face is the Queen's at twenty-eight, softened, the lips parted, the eyes direct. The rose is the Queen's flower and the Trianon's; the foliage behind is the garden. The picture is the gaulle with the scandal removed, and it is also, in its pose and its address, the manner's most famous application: the Queen of France painted as a woman about to speak to you.
The royal collection; seized at the Revolution; Versailles's museum under Louis-Philippe; the Musée de l'Histoire de France since, where it is the picture the public comes for.
The silk against the muslin of the other version; the lace; the hat; the rose; the face, which did not change.
The Rose was the Queen's official informal image for the rest of the reign — the portrait sent as a gift, the one engraved, the one copied for the ministries — and its repetition is the measure of its use. The painter's studio produced versions for the Queen's sisters (Naples, Parma), for Sweden's Gustav III, for the Queen's friends; the painter herself signed several; and the nineteenth century multiplied them further, so that the Rose is the Vigée Le Brun most likely to appear in a country-house sale as 'attributed'. The Versailles prime is distinguished by its handling — the silk's highlights, the lace, the hat — and by its provenance from the royal stores; it hung at the 2015 retrospective as the answer to the gaulle beside it. The picture's celebrity has a cost: it is so familiar that the face is hard to see. Seen fresh, at Versailles, the face is a tired young woman's, kindly painted.
Marie Antoinette with a Rose (Resnick collection): an autograph version of the Versailles Rose of 1783 — the Queen in blue-grey silk with the rose — one of the repetitions the painter made for the Queen's gifts; the Resnick picture, in a Californian private collection, was lent to the 2016 Met exhibition and is among the finest of the versions.
Yolande de Polastron, Duchesse de Polignac, with a Music-Book (National Trust, Waddesdon Manor): the second Polignac — the Duchesse seated at a pianoforte with a music-sheet, in a white dress with a straw hat and blue ribbons, her lips parted as if singing; the Rothschilds' Waddesdon bought it as the period's emblem, and it hangs there among the Sèvres.
La Maréchale-Comtesse de Mailly, née Blanche-Charlotte de Narbonne-Pelet: the wife of the Maréchal de Mailly — the old marshal who was massacred at Abbeville in 1794 — in grey silk with a lace cap, a court portrait of 1783. Private collection.
Documented work · 4 language editions Q28016074 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 155.5 × 130.3 cm, signed and dated 1784 — Royal Collection, Windsor Castle. Calonne (1734–1802), controller-general of finances from November 1783, seated at his desk in a black silk coat with the red ribbon of the Order of the Holy Spirit, a letter to the King in his hand, a paper inscribed Au Roi on the table beside a globe, in a rich interior with a curtain and a column: the grandest male portrait of the painter's Paris years, and the one that attached a scandal to her name.
Calonne was the minister of the last chance: appointed by the Queen's party to restore the finances that Necker and Turgot had failed to reform, he borrowed, spent, rebuilt the illusion of prosperity, and in 1786 presented the King with the programme of reform — a land tax on the privileged orders — that the Assembly of Notables rejected in 1787 and that opened the road to the Estates-General. He was dismissed in April 1787, exiled, and spent the Revolution in England organising the émigrés' finances; he returned in 1802 and died in Paris that year. The portrait of 1784 shows him at the summit — assured, plump, elegant, with the look of a man who is pleased to have been painted.
The pamphlets of 1785–87 said the painter was Calonne's mistress and that he had paid for the portrait with the Hôtel Le Brun, with a box of sweets filled with banknotes, with 300,000 livres; the Souvenirs answer at length — the fee was 4,000 livres, paid by the state, and 'the calumny was so absurd that I did not think it worth denying'. The truth is unknowable and probably dull; the episode's interest is that the portrait of a minister by a woman was read, in the 1780s, as evidence of a liaison, and that the painter's reputation for the rest of her life carried the story.
The composition is the state portrait of the minister — Rigaud's Colbert, Duplessis's Necker — and the painter did it well: the black silk is her best black, the red ribbon the one accent, the hands with the letter a passage of elegance, the face round and intelligent. The interior, with its curtain and column and globe, is the furniture of office; the Au Roi on the paper is the minister's claim. It was shown at the Salon of 1785, where the critics admired the silk and made the jokes.
Calonne took it to England; sold there; in the Royal Collection by the early nineteenth century (it is recorded at Carlton House under George IV, who collected French eighteenth-century pictures with the émigrés' advice); Windsor since. It is the only major Vigée Le Brun in the British royal collection.
The black silk's sheen; the red ribbon; the letter; the paper Au Roi; the globe; the face's satisfaction. Then think of 1787. The Royal Collection's catalogue notes that George IV bought it as a picture of a man he admired, the minister of the monarchy's last prosperity; the King's taste for the French eighteenth century made Carlton House the best collection of it in Britain.
The Duchesse de Guiche (private collection): Aglaé de Polignac, Duchesse de Guiche (1768–1803), the Polignacs' daughter, at sixteen, in a straw hat — the child of the clan, painted by its painter; the 1794 Vienna portrait of the same sitter is in this catalogue. She died at Edinburgh in a fire.
The Comtesse de Cérès (Toledo Museum of Art): a young woman in a white dress with a blue sash and a straw hat with ribbons, seated with a letter — the La Châtre type five years early; Toledo's picture is among the best of the American Paris portraits.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q62272805 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 52 × 39.4 cm (a reduced autograph version; the prime, at the Huntington, is in this catalogue) — Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. The Comte de Vaudreuil (1740–1817) in a grey coat with a red collar and the cross of Saint-Louis, seated, a hand in his waistcoat, turned to the viewer: the painter's patron, friend and — the pamphlets said — lover, and the man who did most to make her career.
Born in Saint-Domingue to a planter family, grand falconer of France, the lover of the Duchesse de Polignac and the intimate of the Queen's circle, Vaudreuil was the Paris of the 1780s' model of the accomplished man: a collector (his sale of 1784, managed by Le Brun, was one of the decade's events), an amateur actor, a patron of Beaumarchais — The Marriage of Figaro was first performed privately at his house at Gennevilliers in 1783 — and the painter's adviser in the Académie affair. He emigrated in July 1789 with the Polignacs, lived in England, returned in 1814 and died a peer. The Souvenirs give him the longest and warmest of their portraits of friends: 'the most amiable man of his time'.
The half-length in a grey coat against a plain ground is the manner's male formula — the turn, the glance, the hand in the waistcoat — and Vaudreuil's face, with its heavy lids and its small mouth, is among the most alive of the painter's men; the red collar and the cross are the accents. The prime version, a three-quarter length with a column (Huntington), was shown at the Salon of 1785 with the Calonne; the Richmond canvas is the painter's own reduction, of the kind she made for friends.
The Vaudreuil family; private collections; the Virginia museum by gift. The Huntington prime came to California with the Arabella Huntington collection.
The eyes under their lids; the hand; the red collar; the cross of Saint-Louis. Then the Huntington version for the whole.
Vaudreuil's role in the career deserves its own note. It was he who, as the Souvenirs say, 'spoke of me to the Queen'; he who commissioned the Juno and the allegories that were to make her a history painter; he whose collection her husband sold and whose taste her pictures served; and he whose name the pamphlets joined to hers. The 1784 sale, which raised money for his debts, included several of her works and set their prices among the old masters'. His portrait by her is the record of a friendship that the painter, at eighty, still described with warmth; the Richmond version's small size suggests a picture made for her own keeping or for a friend's. Seen in Richmond among the museum's French pictures, it is a small, intense head — the grey coat almost dissolving into the ground, the face and the red collar carrying the picture — and it shows how little the painter needed to make a likeness. The picture is unsigned; the attribution is the museum's and Baillio's.
The Comte de Vaudreuil (private collection): a third version of the Vaudreuil half-length, of the same type as the Richmond picture — the grey coat, the red collar — made for a friend; the painter repeated her patron's face as she repeated the Queen's.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q59339702 Wikipedia (fr)
Oil on canvas, 132 × 94 cm — Musée de l'Histoire de France, Versailles. The Queen's two eldest children in a garden: Marie-Thérèse, Madame Royale, at five, in a white dress with a blue sash, her arm round her brother; the Dauphin Louis-Joseph, at two and a half, in a white frock, holding a bird's nest with a bird on his hand; a dog at their feet; a park beyond. The first portrait of the royal children by the painter, shown at the Salon of 1785, and the tenderest picture of the Versailles years.
Marie-Thérèse (1778–1851) was the only one of the four children to survive the Revolution — the Temple's prisoner, exchanged to Austria in 1795, the Duchesse d'Angoulême of the Restoration, 'the only man in the family', Napoleon said. Louis-Joseph (1781–1789), the Dauphin, was a sickly child with a curvature of the spine who died at Meudon on 4 June 1789, a month after the Estates-General opened, in a country too preoccupied to mourn him. The portrait shows the two at their healthiest: the girl protective, the boy plump, the nest a symbol of the nursery's innocence that the Souvenirs describe the Queen arranging.
The composition is a Van Dyck — the royal children of Charles I, which the painter knew from engravings and from Le Brun's trade — translated into the Rousseauian garden: the white dresses, the loose hair, the dog, the park; the handling is the broad wet manner of the muslins with the faces modelled in the painter's thin pink. The Dauphin's bird and nest are painted with a miniaturist's care; the sister's arm round him is the picture's meaning.
At the Salon of 1785 the picture hung with the Calonne and was praised for its 'grace' and its 'truth'; the Dauphin's death in 1789 and the Revolution gave it, like the Queen and her Children, a second meaning as a memorial. It was hidden during the Revolution with the royal portraits and returned to Versailles under Louis-Philippe.
The nest and the bird; the sister's arm; the dog; the white dresses against the green; the Dauphin's plumpness, which was not to last.
The bird's nest in the Dauphin's hand is the picture's emblem and has been read in several ways: as the nursery's innocence, as the family's, as the Queen's wish (the Souvenirs say she arranged the pose) to show her son as a gentle child, and — by the nineteenth century, which loved the picture as a relic — as a foreboding. The painter's handling of it is exact: the nest's straw, the bird's feathers, the boy's fingers. It is the kind of detail she gave to children and withheld from adults, and the picture's charm is in it.
At Versailles the picture hangs near the Queen and her Children and is often passed over for it; seen alone it is the better painted of the two in its parts — the faces are fresher, the garden is a real garden, and the Dauphin is alive. The 2015 retrospective hung it with the Stockholm Julie at two as the painter's two pictures of very small children.
Marie-Gabrielle de Gramont, Duchesse de Caderousse (Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City): a young woman in a red dress with a straw hat and a basket of grapes — the 'vintager' fancy dress of the 1784 Salon, in which the painter showed several women as country girls; the Nelson-Atkins's picture is the liveliest of the group.
Nicolas Beaujon (1718–1786): the banker of the court, the builder of the Élysée's gardens and of the Chartreuse de Beaujon — the Souvenirs describe his paralysis, his collection and his 'Turkish' dinners — in a brown coat, two years before his death; a rare portrait of the financier. Private collection.
The Comte de Vaudreuil (Huntington Art Museum, San Marino): the prime version of the Vaudreuil portrait — three-quarter length, seated, in the grey coat with the red collar, a column behind — shown at the Salon of 1785; the Richmond reduction is in this catalogue with a full entry. The Huntington's came with Arabella Huntington's French pictures.
André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (Versailles): the composer of Richard Cœur-de-Lion (1741–1813), the Queen's favourite musician and the painter's friend — the Souvenirs recall his concerts at the Hôtel Le Brun — in a brown coat with a score; Versailles hangs it among the reign's artists.
Antoinette-Élisabeth-Marie d'Aguesseau, Comtesse de Ségur (Versailles): the wife of the Comte de Ségur — the diplomat, memoirist and ambassador to Russia — in a white dress with a straw hat, shown at the Salon of 1785; the Ségurs were the painter's friends in Paris and, through the Comte's Russian embassy, her introduction to Petersburg.
Bacchante (Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris): a reclining Bacchante with grapes in her hair — a half-length fancy picture of the Tott type, in the Camondo collection's rooms among the Sèvres; the museum's two Vigée Le Bruns are in this catalogue.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q15723876 Wikipedia (fr)
Oil on canvas, 113.8 × 84 cm, signed and dated 1785 — Musée des Augustins, Toulouse. Anne-Marie-Louise Bonne de Thomassin de Montgaillard, Baronne de Crussol-Florensac (1752–1828), seated in a red dress with a black shawl and a broad hat, a music-book of Gluck's Echo et Narcisse open in her hands, turned over her shoulder to the viewer: the most striking of the Salon of 1785's portraits and the one in which the manner's turn is most violent.
The sitter's body faces away, to the right, and her head comes round over the shoulder to meet the viewer, with the hat's brim and the shawl framing the face — a pose the painter used for its animation and that is here at its most extreme, so that the whole picture is a movement. The music-book, with Gluck's title legible, is the sitter's accomplishment and the painter's taste (she was a singer, and Gluck's Paris operas were the Queen's cause); the red dress is the largest area of strong colour in any of the Paris portraits.
The Baronne was a Languedoc heiress married to Alexandre de Crussol-Florensac, whose own portrait by the painter (1787, Met) is in this catalogue; the pair were of the Polignac circle, and the pendants are among the painter's best matched. Toulouse acquired the Baronne's portrait in the nineteenth century as a regional work — the family's lands were in the Midi — and it is the museum's principal eighteenth-century French portrait.
The picture hung at the Salon with the Calonne, the Dauphin and Madame Royale, the Grétry and the Comtesse de Ségur; the critics remarked its 'vivacity' and its 'boldness of pose'. Its modern reputation is as the manner's most dynamic statement, and the 2015 retrospective hung it with the Comtesse de la Châtre as the two masterpieces of the seated woman.
The turn; the hat's brim against the face; the Gluck title; the red against the black; the hands on the book. Then the husband, at the Met, two years later.
The music-book's title is not decorative. Gluck's Écho et Narcisse (1779) was the composer's last Paris opera and a failure, and the Queen's party had championed Gluck against Piccinni in the 'war' of the late 1770s that divided Paris; a sitter who held Gluck's score in 1785 declared a musical and a court allegiance. The painter, who sang, was of the Gluckist party, and the Souvenirs describe the Baronne as one of the best amateur singers of the circle. The picture's red, black and gold — the dress, the shawl, the book's binding — are the colours of a performance.
The Augustins hangs the picture in its eighteenth-century room, where it dominates by colour; the turn of the head is more violent in the original than in reproduction, and the viewer who stands to the right of the picture finds the sitter looking straight at them — the pose was designed for a room, not a page.
Julie Le Brun Looking in a Mirror (Metropolitan Museum of Art): the daughter at five, holding a mirror in which her profile is reflected while her face turns to us — the double portrait in one, a conceit from the Dutch, and the most ingenious of the Julie pictures; the Met's picture came in 2008 with the Wrightsman gifts.
Madame Étienne Vigée: the painter's sister-in-law, Suzanne Rivière, the wife of Étienne Vigée and the mother of the nieces who would edit the Souvenirs — in a fichu and a cap, a family picture. Private collection.
The Marquis de Choiseul (private collection): a Choiseul of the ducal family — perhaps the Marquis de Choiseul-Meuse or -Praslin — in a blue coat with the cross of Saint-Louis, of the mid-1780s; the record's 1750 date precedes the painter's birth and is a placeholder.
Luísa Todi (National Museum of Music, Lisbon): the Portuguese mezzo Luísa Todi (1753–1833), the rival of Mara at the Concert Spirituel and the Queen's favourite singer, in a white dress with a music-sheet — the 'Todi–Mara war' of 1783 divided Paris, and the painter's portrait is of the Todist party; Lisbon's museum holds it as the diva's image.
A Junior Officer of the French Royal Infantry, bust-length (private collection): a small head of a young officer in a white uniform with blue facings — a miniature-scale oil of the kind the painter made for families; the sitter's regiment is identifiable from the facings.
The Vicomtesse de Vaudreuil (Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth): a second version of the Getty picture, three-quarter length — the painter's repetition for the family; the Hood's came with a Dartmouth alumnus's gift.
Sophie de Tott as a Bacchante (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown): the daughter of the Baron de Tott, the French envoy to the Crimea, as a Bacchante with a tambourine and a leopard-skin — the earliest of the painter's Bacchantes and the model for the Lady Hamilton of 1790; the Clark's picture is its best-known Vigée Le Brun.
The Comtesse de Clermont-Tonnerre as a Sultana: a young countess in Turkish dress with a turban and a pipe — the turquerie fancy of the 1780s, which the painter used for a few sitters before the Greek fashion replaced it; the sitter's husband was the liberal deputy of 1789, murdered in 1792. Private collection.
The Comtesse de Châtenois (Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico): a young woman in a white dress with a gauze fichu, half-length — the Ponce museum's one Vigée Le Brun, from the Ferré collection's French eighteenth century.
The Vicomtesse de Vaudreuil (J. Paul Getty Museum): Victoire Pauline de Riquet de Caraman, Vicomtesse de Vaudreuil, the Comte's cousin's wife, in a white dress with a red shawl and a straw hat, seated — the Getty's Vigée Le Brun, of the Polignac-Vaudreuil circle; the Hood Museum's version is in this catalogue.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q19005132 Wikipedia (fr)
Oil on canvas, 104 × 76 cm — Musée du Louvre, Paris. The actress Élisabeth-Félicité Pinet, Madame Molé-Raymond (1759–1833), walking toward the viewer in a blue velvet coat with a fur collar and a large fur muff, a plumed hat, her head turned over her shoulder, against a winter sky: the painter's one portrait of a figure in movement, and the most 'modern' picture of the Paris years.
Madame Molé-Raymond was a star of the Comédie-Italienne, the theatre of the opéra-comique, married to the actor Molé; the painter knew her through the theatrical circle of the Hôtel Le Brun — Dugazon, Saint-Huberty, Préville — and painted her, by the Souvenirs' account, 'as she came in from the cold'. The picture is a walking portrait: the figure advances, the muff is held up against the wind, the hat's plumes blow, the skirt swings; nothing else in the œuvre moves.
The blue velvet and the fur are the painter's broadest handling — the muff is a few strokes of loaded brown, the coat a flat blue with white highlights — and the face, small under the hat, is the manner's sprightly type; the winter sky is a rare outdoor ground. The composition has been compared to Gainsborough's walking ladies and to the English fashion plate; it is also the painter's sense of an actress's entrance. The picture was shown at the Salon of 1787, where it was among the most popular.
The sitter's family; acquired by the Louvre in the nineteenth century (1867 gift); one of the Louvre's six Vigée Le Bruns and the public's favourite after the Self-portraits with Julie.
The muff; the plumes; the skirt's swing; the face turned back; the sky. Then try to find another picture by her in which anyone is walking.
The painter's theatrical portraits — Dugazon as Nina, Saint-Huberty as Dido, Todi, Grassini — are a distinct group in the œuvre, and the Molé-Raymond is their best, because it is not a role: the actress is shown as herself, in the street, in winter, and the picture's energy is the energy of someone used to being looked at. The Comédie-Italienne's stars were the celebrities of the 1780s, and their portraits hung in the Salon beside the duchesses' as equals; the painter, whose own social position was that of an artist among aristocrats, painted them with a fellow-feeling the Souvenirs make explicit.
The Louvre hangs the Molé-Raymond among its Vigée Le Bruns, and it is the one that surprises: the others sit and speak, this one walks and laughs. The fur's handling rewards a close look — a dozen strokes of three browns — and the sky's grey-blue is among the few pieces of weather in the œuvre. The picture was engraved in 1787 and the print, with its walking figure, became a fashion plate; the composition was imitated by the English portraitists of the 1790s, who had their own walking ladies and recognised a rival. Its date is the Salon's; the painter's list gives 1786.
Marguerite Baudard de Saint-James, Marquise de Puységur (Raclin Murphy Museum, Notre Dame): the daughter of the treasurer Baudard de Saint-James — whose folie at Neuilly was the decade's extravagance and whose bankruptcy in 1787 was its scandal — in a white dress with a straw hat; the sitter was the painter's neighbour and friend.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q96634683 Wikipedia (it)
Oil on canvas, bust-length — private collection. A half-length of the Queen in a blue dress with a white fichu and a plumed hat, after the type of the Queen with a Rose and the portraits of the mid-1780s; Wikidata records an Italian title and a private ownership. The picture belongs to the class of autograph and studio repetitions of the Queen's image that the court sent to the Queen's relatives in Italy — her sisters at Naples and Parma, her brother at Milan — and through which the Italian collections came to hold several 'Marie Antoinettes' of varying status.
The Queen's portraits in Italy have a particular history: Maria Carolina at Naples and Maria Amalia at Parma, the Queen's sisters, received portraits as gifts; the painter herself, at Naples in 1790, found the sisters' collections full of her own work and painted, for Maria Carolina, further versions. A bust-length of this kind could be a head cut from a larger repetition, a studio reduction, or a later copy, and without a technical study the catalogue can only note the type — the blue dress, the fichu, the plumes, the soft three-quarter face — and the fact that the Queen's image in Italy was Vigée Le Brun's.
The blue-and-white bust with a plumed hat is the most frequently repeated of the Queen's images after the Rose: it appears in engravings of the 1780s, in miniatures, on the Sèvres porcelain, and in the many 'after Vigée Le Brun' portraits that hang in European houses. Its prime is the Versailles Rose; the bust versions simplify the pose by removing the hands and the flower, and keep the face — which is the face the painter fixed, and which the Revolution's caricatures would distort in the 1790s from this very source.
The face against the Versailles prime; the fichu; the plumes; the handling of the silk, which in an autograph version is wet and broad and in a copy is dry.
The diplomatic circulation of the Queen's image is well documented. Versions of the Rose and of the bust types went to Naples, where Maria Carolina kept a cabinet of her sister's portraits; to Parma; to Vienna; to Brussels, to the Archduchess Marie-Christine; and a number of these descended, with the Italian Bourbons' and Habsburgs' collections, into the private hands from which they have emerged since the nineteenth century as 'Vigée Le Bruns' of varying warrant. The record for this canvas is minimal; its inclusion in the catalogue marks the type rather than the object, and a viewer who encounters it should compare it with the Versailles prime and the Hessian gaulle, which are the measure of what an autograph Queen looks like. The Italian title on the record — Ritratto di Maria Antonietta a mezzo busto — suggests a sale or a collection catalogue in Italy, which is consistent with the Bourbon-Habsburg descent. The catalogue keeps it in the main sequence on Wikidata's authority and with this caution.
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.