The picture

Oil on panel, 105 × 84 cm — Musée du Louvre, Paris. The painter at thirty-one, seated, in a white Greek tunic with a red band, her hair loose and unpowdered, embracing her daughter Julie, six, who sits on her knee in a white shift and looks out; the mother's mouth is open in a smile that shows her teeth. The first of the two Self-portraits with Julie, shown at the Salon of 1787, and the picture that gave the 1780s their image of maternity.

The teeth

The smile with teeth was the Salon's scandal of 1787: the Mémoires secrets complained that 'an affectation which artists, connoisseurs and persons of taste are unanimous in condemning, and which finds no precedent among the ancients, is that in smiling Madame Vigée Le Brun shows her teeth', and the complaint has been quoted in every account since as the moment the manner's essential device — the face about to speak — met the academy's decorum. The painter was unrepentant; the Uffizi self-portrait of 1790 shows the teeth again.

The Madonna and the antique

The composition is Raphael's Madonna della Sedia — the mother curled round the child, the child's face turned out — put into Greek dress; the painter had seen the Raphael in engravings and would see it in Florence in 1792. The à la grecque costume — the tunic, the band, the bare arms — was the painter's own fashion, launched at the 'Greek supper' of the same years and adopted by the Queen's circle; the picture is the manner's claim to the antique and to the history painter's Raphael, made through a portrait of herself. Rousseau's Émile, with its nursing mothers, is behind it; so is the painter's wish, after the Calonne gossip, to be seen as a mother.

The panel and the pair

Painted on a mahogany panel — unusual for her — with the flesh at its most luminous; the Louvre's second Self-portrait with Julie (1789, in this catalogue) repeats the embrace in a red shawl and a turban, with the child clinging to the mother's neck. The two were the most popular pictures the painter ever showed and the most engraved; they were seized at the Revolution as émigré property and have been in the Louvre since.

What to look at

The teeth; the child's eyes on us; the mother's arm round the child's back; the red band; the bare arms. Then the 1789 version, where the child is three years older and the mother's face has changed.

Reception

The 1786 Self-portrait with Julie was the Salon's most popular picture in 1787 and has been the Louvre's most popular Vigée Le Brun since: the image of the mother and child in Greek dress went into engravings, into porcelain, into the nineteenth century's idea of the painter as the painter of maternity. Its modern readers have been more divided — feminist art history has read it as the painter's negotiation of the 'feminine' role the Salon demanded, an assertion of professional identity made through the one subject a woman could claim without reproach — and the picture sustains both: it is a tender image and a calculated one, and the teeth are its wit.

The Comte d'Espagnac (Wallace Collection, London): Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Damarzit de Sahuguet, Comte d'Espagnac (1713–1783)? — the Wallace's identification is of a Comte d'Espagnac in a blue coat with a powdered wig; the picture, in the manner of the mid-1780s, is the Perregaux's male companion at Hertford House.

Alexandre-Charles-Emmanuel de Crussol-Florensac (1743–1815) (Metropolitan Museum of Art): the husband of the Toulouse Baronne de Crussol — the Comte d'Artois's captain of the guards, later a peer of the Restoration — in a red coat with the cross of Saint-Louis, seated with a book, the pendant to his wife's portrait of 1785; the Met's second Vigée Le Brun, from the Bache collection.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 106 × 83 cm — Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. A boy of about ten, nude but for a drapery, with wings, a laurel wreath and a trumpet, seated on a cloud against a sky: Prince Henryk Lubomirski (1777–1850), the adopted son of the Princess Izabela Lubomirska, painted in Paris as a 'Genius of Fame' or 'Love of Glory' in 1787–89, and the most accomplished of the painter's mythological portraits of children.

The sitter and the princess

Izabela Lubomirska, née Czartoryska (1736–1816), the 'blue marquise', was the richest woman in Poland and a fixture of Paris society in the 1780s; she had adopted the boy, a distant relative, and paid for his education and his portraits — by the painter (this and a second version), by Kauffman, by Canova, who carved him as Cupid. The painter's Souvenirs describe him as 'the most beautiful child one could see' and the princess as a patron who 'made me promise to paint her protégé'. The princess and the boy sat to her again in Vienna in 1793, and she painted the princess in Russia.

The picture

The composition is a Cupid of the Bolognese type — the boy on a cloud, the wings, the wreath, the trumpet — with the child's face painted from life: the large eyes, the soft mouth, the curls. The nude is the one the painter could manage, a child's, and it is done with the sweetness of the Julie pictures; the sky is the Straw Hat's blue. The allegory — Fame, or the Love of Glory — was the princess's choice for a boy destined for greatness; the painter's interest was the face.

History

The Lubomirski collection at Łańcut; sold in the nineteenth century; the Berlin museums by purchase; one of two Vigée Le Bruns in Berlin. A second version is at Łańcut.

What to look at

The face; the wings' feathers; the trumpet; the cloud; the laurel. Then compare Julie as Flora, ten years later, for the same tenderness in a girl.

The genre and the painter

The allegorical portrait of a child — as Cupid, as a Genius, as Flora — was a Roman and an English fashion (Reynolds's children as Cupids, Kauffman's) that the painter took up in the late 1780s and practised through the exile: the Lubomirski of 1787–89 is its first major example, and the Russian Julie as Flora of 1799 its last. The genre suited her because a child's body is the nude a woman could paint, and because the allegory gave the portrait the rank her reception piece had failed to win. The Berlin picture's success is that the allegory is light and the child heavy — the boy's weight on the cloud, the curls, the plump hand on the trumpet, are observed, and the Genius is a portrait of a boy who has been told to sit still. Henryk Lubomirski grew up to be a soldier, a collector and the founder of the Ossoliński institute's museum at Lwów; the Canova Cupid and this picture were the treasures of his youth, and the Berlin canvas was sold by his heirs in the century's collapse of Polish fortunes.

Madame Dugazon in the role of Nina (private collection): Louise-Rosalie Dugazon (1755–1821), the Comédie-Italienne's star, as the mad heroine of Dalayrac's Nina, ou la folle par amour (1786) — the sensation of the season, which made audiences weep — in a white dress with loose hair and a straw hat, looking up; the painter's most famous theatrical portrait, shown at the Salon of 1787.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 271 × 210 cm, signed and dated 1787 — Musée de l'Histoire de France, Versailles. The Queen seated in a red velvet dress trimmed with fur, a plumed hat, with her children: Madame Royale (Marie-Thérèse, eight) leaning on her arm at the left; the infant Duc de Normandie (Louis-Charles, two) on her lap; the Dauphin Louis-Joseph (five) at the right, pointing at a cradle that is empty. The setting is the Salon de la Paix at Versailles, with the Galerie des Glaces beyond and the jewel-cabinet at the right; the composition is a pyramid. The largest and the most important picture the painter made, and the one on which her reputation has rested since.

The commission

The commission came from the Crown — through the Comte d'Angiviller, the director of the King's buildings — in 1785, for 18,000 livres, at a moment when the Queen's reputation had collapsed: the affaire du collier of 1785–86, in which the Cardinal de Rohan was tried for obtaining a diamond necklace in the Queen's name, had made her the object of a hatred that the pamphlets fed daily, and the portrait's purpose was political — to present the Queen as a mother, in the Rousseauian mode of the decade, with her children about her in a royal setting. The painter records the Queen's wish that the portrait should be 'a large picture' showing 'her tenderness for her children', and the composition was worked out in drawings (the Met's Marie Antoinette in a Park, a drawing in this catalogue, is related) over two years.

The cradle

The cradle was to have held Sophie-Hélène-Béatrice, the Queen's fourth child, born in July 1786; she died on 19 June 1787, at eleven months, while the picture was being finished. The painter removed the infant and left the cradle empty — the Dauphin's pointing gesture, which had indicated a sister, became a gesture toward a loss — and the picture went to the Salon in August with the cradle's drapery hanging unoccupied. The Queen is said to have wept before it. Two years later the Dauphin, the pointing boy, died at Meudon (4 June 1789); the child on the Queen's lap became the Dauphin, then Louis XVII, and died in the Temple in June 1795 at ten; Madame Royale survived. The picture is thus the portrait of a family of which, within eight years, one member was alive.

The composition and its sources

The pyramid — the Queen's head at the apex, the children and the cradle at the base — is the composition of the Renaissance Holy Family, and the sources were conscious: Raphael's Holy Families of the Louvre, the Madonna della Sedia, and the painter's own Self-portrait with Julie of 1786, which is the same embrace. The painter had also looked at Van Dyck's Charles I's children and at the Rubens of the Luxembourg for the red velvet and the scale. The setting — the royal apartment, with the cabinet, the carpet, the column — is the state portrait's; the Queen's pose — the children about her, one hand round the infant, the face turned to the viewer with a tired calm — is the domestic picture's. The fusion was the commission's point: a queen as a mother, in her palace.

The face

The Queen was thirty-one, and the painter did not flatter her as she had in 1783: the face is heavier, the jaw fuller, the expression one of composed fatigue; this is the face of a woman who had borne four children and buried one, and who knew what was said of her. The critics of 1787 remarked that the Queen 'was not embellished', and the Souvenirs say the painter wished to paint 'the Queen as she was' — which, given the painter's usual practice, is itself a statement about the picture's purpose. The children are the painter's: the Dauphin's pointing hand, Madame Royale's leaning, the infant's squirm are observed, and the infant is among the best babies in French painting.

The Salon of 1787

The picture was hung at the Salon Carré in August 1787 with the Self-portrait with Julie, the Marquise de Pezay and the Marquise de Rougé, and the Madame Molé-Raymond; it was the exhibition's most discussed work. The critics divided: the Mercure praised its 'grandeur'; the pamphleteers made the inevitable jokes about 'Madame Déficit' and her brood; and a story — which the painter repeats — says that the picture was installed at Versailles with a delay because the Queen feared the public's response, and that a wag wrote under the empty frame 'Voilà le déficit'. The painter's own account is that the Queen came to the Louvre to see it, and that 'she was pleased'.

The Revolution and after

The picture hung at Versailles until 1789; it was taken down and hidden — the Souvenirs say the Queen herself had it removed from the state apartments when the mob came on 5 October, so that it should not be defaced — and survived the Revolution in storage; it was returned to Versailles under the Restoration and placed by Louis-Philippe in the Musée de l'Histoire de France in 1837, where it has hung since as the museum's most famous picture. It was lent to the 2015 retrospective in Paris, where it was the exhibition's centrepiece; it did not travel to New York.

The painting

The handling is the painter's grandest: the red velvet laid in broad strokes with the fur's highlights dragged over it; the Queen's face modelled with care; the children's white dresses and the cradle's drapery painted wet and fast; the setting's carpet, cabinet and column done with a decorator's competence. The picture's size — nearly three metres high — is unusual for her, and the composition's control at that scale is the evidence of what she could do when the occasion demanded. The canvas is in good condition; Versailles cleaned it for the 2015 exhibition.

Readings

The picture has been read as the Queen's apology — the bad mother of the pamphlets shown as a good one; as the Crown's propaganda, which it was; as a Holy Family with a missing child; as the last portrait of the old monarchy's idea of itself — the family, the palace, the red velvet — painted by its own painter two years before the end; and, by the modern historians of the Queen's image (Chantal Thomas, Lynn Hunt), as the document of a campaign that could not succeed, because the public had decided. It is also a painting, and as a painting it is the painter's masterpiece: the one picture in which the manner's intimacy and the state portrait's scale are held together, and in which the face — tired, composed, unflattered — is the truest she painted.

What to look at

The empty cradle and the Dauphin's hand; the Queen's face; the infant's squirm; Madame Royale's lean; the red velvet and the fur; the Galerie des Glaces through the door; the jewel-cabinet. Then the pyramid, which is Raphael's, and the Queen's eyes, which are not.

Julie Le Brun (private collection): the daughter at seven, in a white dress with a blue sash, half-length — one of the Julie heads of the Paris years, between the Mirror of 1785 and the self-portraits with her.

The Comtesse de Béon (private collection): a young woman in a white dress with a red shawl, seated, of the 1787 Salon year's clientele; the Béons were a Gascon military family of the court.

A Young Woman Playing a Lyre (Cincinnati Art Museum): a sitter in a white tunic à la grecque with a lyre, of the Greek-supper year — the antique fashion's first portrait; Cincinnati's picture came with the Mary Emery collection.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 123.4 × 155.9 cm, signed and dated 1787 — National Gallery of Art, Washington (Kress collection). Two young women seated together on a sofa — the Marquise de Pezay, in a blue dress with a white turban, and her friend the Marquise de Rougé, in a white dress with a striped shawl, her two small sons beside her — against a column and a landscape: the painter's most ambitious group of the Paris years after the Queen's, shown at the Salon of 1787, and her one picture of female friendship.

The sitters

Caroline de Murat de Lestang, Marquise de Pezay, widowed in 1777 of the poet-soldier Masson de Pezay; and Nathalie de Rougé, née Bouchard, with Alexis (b. 1784) and Adrien (b. 1785) — the two women were intimate friends, and the portrait, commissioned by the Marquise de Pezay, is a monument to the friendship: the two women's hands touch, the elder boy leans on his mother, the younger looks up. The Rougés emigrated; Adrien became a general of the Restoration.

The picture

The group is arranged on a diagonal from the turbaned head at the left to the infant at the right, with the sofa's curve and the column's vertical holding it; the colours are the blue and white of the one dress against the white and stripes of the other, with the shawl's red. The painter's gift for the child is at its best in the younger boy; her gift for the intimate pose is in the two women's hands. The critics of 1787 praised it as a 'charming composition'; it is the nearest she came, in a group, to the informal grace of the single portraits.

History

The Pezay family; the Rougé family; the Paris market; Samuel H. Kress, whose collection came to the National Gallery in Washington; one of three Vigée Le Bruns in the gallery with the Madame d'Aguesseau de Fresnes and a Queen en gaulle version.

What to look at

The two women's hands; the turban; the shawl; the younger boy's upturned face; the sofa's curve. Then the column and the landscape, which are the setting's only formality.

The Salon of 1787

The group hung at the Salon beside the Queen and her Children and the Self-portrait with Julie — three pictures of mothers and children by one painter in one room — and the critics noted the theme: the painter of the Queen's maternity had made maternity her subject, and the Rougé boys were the Dauphin's and Julie's companions on the wall. The picture's later history took it out of France early; the Kress purchase in the 1940s brought it to Washington, where it hangs in the French galleries as the gallery's largest Vigée Le Brun.

The friendship

Portraits of two women together, as friends rather than as sisters or mother and daughter, are rare in the eighteenth century, and the Pezay and Rougé is among the few; the painter's own friendships — with the Polignacs, with the Comtesse Vincent, with the Princesse Kurakin — were the life's structure, and this picture, commissioned by one friend to include the other, is the nearest the œuvre comes to painting one.

The picture

Oil on panel, 105 × 84 cm, signed and dated 1788 — Musée du Louvre, Paris. The landscape painter Hubert Robert (1733–1808), seated, palette and brushes in hand, in a brown coat with a white cravat, his hair powdered and disordered, his head turned sharply to the right and up, as if something had caught his eye: the most vigorous portrait the painter made, and the one in which she abandoned her manner for her subject.

The sitter

'Robert des Ruines', the painter of Roman ruins and Parisian demolitions, the designer of the Queen's gardens at the Trianon, the keeper of the King's pictures at the Louvre, and one of the most sociable men in Paris: the Souvenirs describe him as 'the life of every gathering', a man who 'painted as he talked, quickly and with spirit', and who was, with Vernet and Brongniart, the painter's closest artist-friend. He survived the Terror — imprisoned at Saint-Lazare, where he painted on plates — and died in 1808, at his easel, the painter says, which was 'the death he would have chosen'.

The picture

Nothing in it is the manner. The turn is the sitter's, not the formula's; the mouth is closed; the eyes look away from the viewer; the hair is a powdered disorder; the coat is painted with a loaded brush in broad strokes; the face is modelled with a vigour and a roughness that the women's portraits never show. The painter said she painted him 'as he was, careless of his dress and full of fire', and the picture has been compared to Fragonard's figures de fantaisie — the quick, brilliant portraits of the 1760s — and to the Romantic portrait of the artist that Géricault would make: the genius interrupted. It was shown at the Salon of 1789 and was, the critics agreed, the best thing there by her.

History

Given to Robert; seized at the Revolution with the painter's property (the Souvenirs say it was in her house) and entered the national collection; the Louvre since, where it hangs with the Vernet — the two artist-friends, ten years apart — and where it is, for most painters who look at it, her best picture.

Seeing it

The Louvre's hanging allows the comparison the picture invites: beside the Self-portrait with Julie of the same year, the Robert is a different painter — harder, faster, a painter of men. That she could do this and chose, for her sitters, not to, is the conclusion the picture forces.

What to look at

The eyes, looking away; the hair; the brushes; the coat's strokes; the cravat. Then the turn of the head, which is not hers but his.

Reception

The Robert has been the painter's critics' favourite since 1789 — the picture cited against the charge of mere charm — and the modern literature has made it the evidence of a road not taken: Baillio calls it the best male portrait of the French 1780s; the 2015 catalogue hung it as the painter's masterpiece of the Paris years with the Queen and her Children. The painter herself, in the Souvenirs, says only that Robert 'was pleased', which, given her usual account of her sitters' delight, is modest.

Mademoiselle Alexandrine-Émilie Brongniart (National Gallery, London): the daughter of the architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart — the painter's friend, the builder of the Bourse — at eight, in a white dress with a blue sash, winding wool; the National Gallery's second Vigée Le Brun, bought in 1897 with the Straw Hat, and the museum's best-loved child portrait.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 271 × 195 cm — Palace of Versailles. The Queen at thirty-two, seated, full-length, in a blue velvet dress with a white fichu and a lace-trimmed cap, a book in her hands, beside a table with flowers and a cushion, in a room with a curtain and a column: the last portrait of the Queen by the painter, made in 1788 for the Queen's own apartments, and the quietest.

The last portrait

After the Queen and her Children of 1787 the painter made one more: a seated full-length, without children, without the red velvet of state, in the blue that was the Queen's colour and with a book — the attribute of the private woman, the reader of the Trianon's library. The Souvenirs mention no sitting for it, and it may have been painted from the studies of 1787; the face is the 1787 face, tired and composed, a year older. The picture hung in the Queen's apartments; after 1789 it was stored; it was returned to Versailles under the Restoration. It is the image of the Queen that the Restoration preferred — the reading mother, dignified, in blue — and it was copied for the Bourbon court and for the Duchesse d'Angoulême, the Queen's daughter, who had her mother's portraits gathered.

The picture

The composition is a state portrait's — the full length, the column, the curtain, the table — with the manner's informality in the pose: the Queen leans slightly, the book is half-closed, a hand rests on the table. The blue velvet is the painter's broadest fabric passage, the fichu's gauze and the cap's lace her finest; the flowers on the table are a still life. The scale — nearly three metres — is that of the Children, and the picture was evidently intended as its pendant or successor: the mother without the children, reading.

Versions

A version at Versailles's museum and a reduced one in a private collection; studio copies. The Versailles full-length is the prime.

Seeing it

The picture hangs at Versailles in the sequence of the Queen's portraits, and it is the one visitors pass: no children, no scandal, no rose. It is also the best painted of the full-lengths, and the most honest face of the Queen — the face of a woman who, in 1788, knew she was disliked and was sitting for her portrait anyway.

What to look at

The book, half-closed; the blue velvet's folds; the cap's lace; the flowers; the face, a year after the Children. Then the absence — the chair beside her is empty.

The Restoration's Queen

The picture's afterlife is the Bourbon Restoration's: Louis XVIII and Charles X, the Queen's brothers-in-law, and the Duchesse d'Angoulême, her daughter, made the cult of the martyred Queen a state religion, and this portrait — grave, maternal, reading — was its preferred icon, engraved for the chapel at the Conciergerie and copied for the royal houses. The painter, who lived to see it, records in the Souvenirs that the Duchesse d'Angoulême received her 'with a kindness that brought back all my memories', and the kindness had this picture in it.

Charlotte-Eustache-Sophie de Fuligny-Damas, Marquise de Grollier (private collection): the flower-painter Madame de Grollier (1741–1828), the painter's friend and the amateur whose flower pieces Redouté admired, in a black dress with a white cap, holding a brush — a portrait of a woman painter by another.

Geneviève-Sophie Le Couteulx du Molay (Musée Nissim de Camondo): the wife of the banker Le Couteulx du Molay — the family whose bank financed the Revolution's governments and whose château at Le Molay sheltered the painter's friends — in a white dress with a red shawl and a straw hat; the Camondo's second.

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France (New Orleans Museum of Art): a bust-length of the Queen in a blue dress with a plumed hat, of the late 1780s type — one of the studio repetitions of the Queen's image in America; New Orleans's French collection holds it as the city's royal portrait.

The picture

Oil on canvas, full-length — private collection (sold at Sotheby's New York in 2019 for $7.2 million, the record for the painter). Muhammad Dervish Khan, one of the three ambassadors sent by Tipu Sultan of Mysore to Louis XVI in 1788, standing full-length in a white robe and a turban with a dagger at his waist and a sword in his hand, against a landscape and a sky: the painter's one portrait of a non-European sitter, and among her most remarkable pictures.

The embassy

Tipu Sultan, the 'Tiger of Mysore', sent an embassy to Versailles in 1788 to secure French support against the British in India; the ambassadors — Muhammad Dervish Khan, Akbar Ali Khan and Muhammad Osman Khan — were received by the King in August and became the season's sensation, visited, painted and written about. The Souvenirs record the painter's commission from the King's household to paint the ambassadors, the difficulties (the sitter would not be painted by a woman until the King's wish was conveyed; he sat in his own apartments at the Hôtel de Bayonne; his servants objected to the portrait's being taken away and it had to be removed by stratagem), and her fascination with the costume and the bearing. She painted Dervish Khan full-length and Osman Khan with his son; the second is untraced.

The picture

The composition is the full-length state portrait — the standing figure, the sword, the landscape — applied to a sitter whose dress, bearing and colour the painter had never painted: the white muslin robe with its gold, the turban, the dark face with its beard, the hand on the sword. The handling of the muslin is the painter's, broad and wet; the face is painted with an attention that is unlike the manner's softening — the sitter is made formidable, not amiable, and the picture's force is in the difference. It was shown at the Salon of 1789 with the Robert and was, with it, the exhibition's surprise.

History

The painter's own — the pictures of the ambassadors stayed in her possession, she says, because the embassy left without them; her estate; private collections in France; sold in 2019 to a collector and exhibited since at the Met's 'Tipu Sultan' displays and elsewhere. Its emergence and its price made it, for a season, the most discussed Vigée Le Brun.

Seeing it

The picture is rarely seen; its exhibition in New York in 2019–20 allowed comparison with the Met's La Châtre of the same year, and the contrast was the point: the same hand, the same year, two worlds.

The sale and the reputation

The 2019 sale was a marker in the painter's market and in the market for portraits of non-European sitters by European hands; the price, ten times the previous record, reflected both the picture's rarity and a new attention to the history it records — the Mysore embassy, the French-Indian alliance against Britain, the sitter's own career (he was executed by Tipu on his return, some accounts say, for the embassy's failure). The painting's technique, examined for the sale, confirmed the autograph handling throughout and the Souvenirs' account of its making.

What to look at

The turban; the sword; the muslin's gold; the face; the sky. Then the bearing, which no other sitter of hers has.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 114.3 × 87.6 cm, signed and dated 1789 — Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of Jessie Woolworth Donahue, 1954). A young woman in a white muslin dress with a blue sash and a straw hat with ribbons, seated on a sofa with a book in her lap, turned to the viewer with the manner's parted lips and direct eyes, against a plain brown ground: the most admired of the Paris portraits in America, and the manner's textbook.

The sitter

Aglaé Bontemps (1762–1848), daughter of the King's valet de chambre and married to the Comte de la Châtre, was a beauty of the Queen's circle; she separated from her husband, emigrated with her lover the Marquis de Jaucourt, returned, divorced, and married Jaucourt in 1799 — he became a peer of France and she a fixture of the Restoration. The painter's Souvenirs do not mention her; the picture does not need them.

The manner at its summit

Everything the Conseils recommend is here: the sitter seated, the body turned, the head brought round, the light from the upper left, the hands occupied with a book, the plain ground, the muslin painted wet and broad, the face thin and glowing with the lake at the lips, the eyes enlarged, the mouth about to speak. The dress is the chemise à la reine in its 1789 form — the last year it was a fashion and not a uniform; the hat is the straw of the Straw Hat self-portrait; the sash is the Polignac's blue. The picture is, for the Met's curators and for most viewers, the most perfect statement of the manner, and its date makes it the old regime's last portrait.

The Salon of 1789

Shown at the Salon of August 1789 — the Bastille had fallen, the night of 4 August had abolished the feudal privileges, and the Salon opened in a Louvre whose surroundings were in ferment — the picture was praised for its 'freshness' and its 'ease'. Two months later the painter was gone.

History

The sitter; her family; private collections; bought by the Woolworth heiress Jessie Donahue and given to the Met in 1954; the Met's most exhibited Vigée Le Brun and the cover of its 2016 retrospective catalogue.

Seeing it

At the Met the picture hangs in the French eighteenth-century galleries among the Fragonards and the Greuzes, and it holds the wall: the white and the blue against the brown, the face's life, the muslin's handling. Stand close for the sash and far for the face.

What to look at

The sash; the hat's ribbons; the book; the muslin's folds; the lips; the eyes. Then the date, and what it meant.

The Met's picture

The La Châtre has been the Met's chosen Vigée Le Brun for exhibition and reproduction since its arrival — the cover of the 2016 catalogue, the poster, the postcard — and its selection is a judgement: among the Met's three (with the Madame Grand and the Crussol-Florensac), it is the one in which the manner is complete and the handling flawless. The picture's condition is excellent; it has never been relined heavily, and the muslin's impasto is intact.

Louise-Marie-Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre, Duchesse d'Orléans (Versailles): the Versailles version of the Bank of France picture of 1789 — the Duchesse in white with the black-and-gold shawl and the broad hat; the museum's, from the Orléans family's gifts under Louis-Philippe, the sitter's son.

The picture

Oil on panel, 115.5 × 86.5 cm, signed and dated 1789 — Musée du Louvre, Paris. A young mother in a white chemise dress with a red shawl, seated, her small daughter in a white frock on her knee with an arm round her neck, against a dark ground: the wife and child of the architect Pierre Rousseau, painted in the year of the Self-portrait with Julie and in the same embrace.

The sitters

Pierre Rousseau (1751–1829) was the architect of the Hôtel de Salm — now the Palais de la Légion d'honneur — the most admired Parisian house of the 1780s, built for the Prince of Salm-Kyrburg across the river from the Tuileries; his wife, Madame Rousseau, and their daughter sat to the painter in 1789, and the portrait was shown at the Salon of that year beside the Self-portrait with Julie. The Rousseau family's connection to the painter was through the building world of the Hôtel Le Brun and through Hubert Robert, Rousseau's friend.

The embrace

The composition repeats the Self-portrait with Julie of 1789 almost exactly — the mother seated, the child on her knee with an arm about her neck, the red shawl, the white dresses, the mother's face to the viewer — and the two pictures were evidently painted together and shown together: the painter's own maternity and a client's, in the same pose. The Rousseau version is the more restrained: the mother does not smile, the child looks at the viewer with a child's seriousness, the colour is cooler. The panel support, as in the self-portraits, gives the flesh its luminosity.

History

The Rousseau family; acquired by the Louvre in the nineteenth century; one of the Louvre's six. It hangs beside the Self-portrait with Julie of 1789, and the pairing is the best available demonstration of how the painter adapted one composition to two sitters.

Seeing it

The picture is a lesson in the manner's flexibility: the same pose, the same shawl, a different face and a different mood, and the result is a portrait that is not a self-portrait's copy but its cousin. The child's arm round the neck is the detail that makes both pictures, and it is better observed here.

The Hôtel de Salm

A word on the sitter's husband's building, because it is the world the picture belongs to: Rousseau's Hôtel de Salm (1782–87), the neoclassical palace on the Quai d'Orsay with its rotunda and its Ionic court, was the most admired new building in Paris and the model, later, for Jefferson's Monticello; the architect's wife and child, painted by the Queen's painter in the chemise of 1789, are the building's domestic face, and the Salon of 1789 hung the portrait as a society picture. The panel was acquired by the Louvre from the family in 1883, and its early cleaning left it in good state.

What to look at

The child's arm; the mother's unsmiling face; the red shawl; the white frocks; the dark ground. Then the self-portrait beside it.

Madame d'Aguesseau de Fresnes (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Kress collection): a lady of the d'Aguesseau family in a white dress with a red shawl and a turban, seated — the turban's first appearance in the Paris portraits, shown at the Salon of 1789; Washington's second Vigée Le Brun.

Philippe-Henri, Marquis de Ségur, Maréchal de France (1724–1801) (Versailles): the Minister of War of the 1780s — the author of the 'Ségur ordinance' requiring four quarters of nobility for officers — in his marshal's uniform with the blue ribbon; a state portrait of the last year, at Versailles among the ministers.

The picture

Oil on panel, 100 × 79 cm, signed and dated 1789 — Wallace Collection, London. Adélaïde de Praël, Madame Perregaux (1758–1794), the wife of the banker Jean-Frédéric Perregaux, leaning on a window-sill with a red curtain, in a white dress with a red-and-black hat with plumes, her hand at her cheek, looking out with the manner's smile: the most rococo of the Paris portraits, and the one the Wallace Collection's founders bought as the type of the period.

The sitter and the bank

Jean-Frédéric Perregaux, Swiss-born, was the banker of the Paris elite in the 1780s and of the Revolution's governments in the 1790s — the founder, with Laffitte, of the house that became the Banque de France's model; his wife, painted in the last summer of the old regime, died in 1794. Their daughter Hortense married Marshal Marmont. The Perregaux circle — financiers, Swiss Protestants, Necker's world — was not the Queen's, and the portrait is the painter's one commission from the banking bourgeoisie that would inherit France.

The picture

The composition — a woman leaning from a window, a curtain, a hand at the cheek — is a Netherlandish type (the 'window portrait' of Dou and the Flemish) that the painter's dealer-husband's trade had shown her, and it is the only time she used it; the effect is of a sitter leaning out to speak. The hat, with its red and black plumes against the white dress, is the picture's colour; the face is the manner's. The panel support is the one she used for her best-finished pictures.

History

The Perregaux family; Sir Richard Wallace, the founder's son, who bought it in the 1870s for Hertford House among the Bouchers and Fragonards of the Wallace Collection's French eighteenth century; the Collection since 1897. It hangs in the Oval Drawing Room with the Collection's other late-eighteenth-century French portraits and is the best known Vigée Le Brun in Britain after the Straw Hat.

Seeing it

The Wallace hangs it low, among small pictures, and its scale surprises; the hat is the first thing one sees and the face the second, which is the picture's order. The Comte d'Espagnac (1786, also Wallace, in this catalogue) is its male companion in the Collection.

What to look at

The hat's plumes; the window-sill; the hand at the cheek; the red curtain; the smile. Then the Fragonards on the opposite wall, for the world the picture came out of. The panel's date, 1789, and the sitter's death in 1794 give the picture its own small history: the banker's wife in her plumed hat in the last summer, gone in the Terror's year.

Reception

The Perregaux has been, since Wallace's purchase, the English public's Vigée Le Brun of the boudoir kind — the hat, the smile, the window — and it has suffered a little from the company: among the Fragonards and the Bouchers it looks like their descendant, which it partly is, and the modern viewer who knows the Robert or the La Châtre finds it light. It is light; it is also among her most inventive compositions, and the only one in which the sitter is framed.

A Boy Playing with a Yo-yo (émigrette) (Musée Leblanc-Duvernoy, Auxerre): a small boy in a red coat with the toy that the émigrés would give its French name — the émigrette — in a garden; the Auxerre museum's picture is a rare child's genre portrait in the œuvre.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 110 × 84 cm — Banque de France, Paris. The Duchesse d'Orléans (1753–1821), daughter of the Duc de Penthièvre and wife of the future Philippe-Égalité, seated in a white dress with a black-and-gold shawl, her hair loose and unpowdered under a broad hat, against a landscape and a sky: the last of the painter's three portraits of the Duchesse, and the one in which the manner's informality is applied to the richest woman in France.

The sitter

Marie-Adélaïde de Penthièvre, heiress of the Toulouse-Penthièvre fortune (the largest in France), married in 1769 Louis-Philippe-Joseph d'Orléans, the Duc de Chartres, later d'Orléans, later Philippe-Égalité — the Jacobin prince who voted for his cousin's death and was guillotined in November 1793. The Duchesse, who had separated from him in 1790, was imprisoned in the Terror, exiled in 1797, and returned in 1814 to see her son Louis-Philippe become King in 1830. The painter portrayed her three times — in 1778 as Duchesse de Chartres (her first important commission, the Souvenirs say), in 1780 (Marseille), and in 1789 — and describes her as 'a princess of rare goodness' with 'a melancholy that her marriage explained'.

The picture

The melancholy is in the face: the Duchesse, at thirty-six, looks at the viewer with the manner's parted lips and a sadness the manner usually excludes; the landscape ground, unusual for the painter, places her outdoors in the English manner; the shawl's black and gold is the picture's colour. The composition is the La Châtre's without the sofa — the same year, the same dress, a different woman — and the difference is the sitter's: the Duchesse was not a beauty and the painter did not pretend.

History

The Orléans family; the Banque de France's collection, formed in the twentieth century with a taste for the Orléans — the Bank was founded under the Consulate in the Hôtel de Toulouse, the Penthièvre family's house, which explains the interest; it hangs in the Bank's galleries and is rarely lent. A version of 1789 is at Versailles (in this catalogue).

Seeing it

The picture is one of the few in the œuvre in which the painter gave a sitter an unhappy face; seen beside the La Châtre of the same year it is the manner's other possibility, and the more interesting.

What to look at

The face; the shawl; the loose hair; the landscape; the hands. Then the 1778 Duchesse de Chartres, for the woman eleven years before. The Banque de France's collection was formed for the Hôtel de Toulouse's rooms and is shown on open days; the portrait of the house's last private mistress's daughter-in-law is its most appropriate possession, and its least seen.

The three portraits

The 1778 Duchesse de Chartres (untraced, known from the engraving), the 1780 Marseille picture and the 1789 Bank of France canvas make a sequence of eleven years in one woman's face: the bride of 1778, the mother of 1780, the separated wife of 1789. The painter's Souvenirs place the first among the commissions that 'made my reputation', and the last among the pictures of the final Paris summer; the Versailles version of 1789 (in this catalogue) is the museum's, and the Bank's is the prime.

The picture

Oil on panel, 130 × 94 cm — Musée du Louvre, Paris. The painter at thirty-four, seated, in a white chemise dress with a red shawl and a turban-like headscarf, embracing her daughter Julie, nine, in a blue dress, who clings to her neck and looks out; the mother looks at the viewer with a tenderness held in a pose. The second of the two Self-portraits with Julie, shown at the Salon of 1789 — the last Salon of the old regime — and the picture the painter left behind when she fled in October.

The two self-portraits

The first (1786, Louvre, in this catalogue) is the Madonna à la grecque with the smile and the teeth; the second is its development: the child is older and clings rather than sits, the mother's face is fuller and more serious, the dress is the chemise of 1789 rather than the tunic of 1786, and the red shawl is the picture's colour. The painter's list gives the second as 'my portrait with my daughter, in a turban', and it was the more admired of the two at the time: the Journal de Paris called it 'the most touching picture of the Salon'. It hung, in August 1789, three weeks after the Bastille; in October the painter left it in the Hôtel Le Brun; in 1794 it was seized as émigré property and sent to the national depot; it entered the Louvre with the confiscations and has been there since — the painter saw it again, in 1802, in the museum, as the property of the state.

The embrace

The pose is the Madonna della Sedia's refined: the child's arm round the mother's neck, the mother's arms round the child, the two faces close, the child's looking out, the mother's looking out — the picture is a double address, and the child's look is as direct as the mother's. The handling is the panel manner of the 1786 picture: the flesh thin and glowing, the white dress broad, the shawl's red laid in a few strokes, the blue of the child's dress the one cool note.

Julie

Julie at nine is the subject of the picture as much as the mother; the Souvenirs describe her at this age as 'beautiful as an angel, with a thousand graces', and the exile that began that October made the child the painter's companion for eleven years — and then the quarrel of 1800 made her a stranger. The picture is the last of Julie in France and the last in which the two are one.

Seeing it

The Louvre hangs the two self-portraits together with the Madame Rousseau, and the three panels make a small room of the painter's maternity: the visitor should compare the two self-portraits' faces, three years apart, for what the painter allowed herself to record.

What to look at

The child's arm round the neck; the turban; the red shawl; the two faces' closeness; the blue dress. Then the 1786 picture, for the difference. The panel support is mahogany, as in 1786; the Louvre's examination found the flesh painted thin over a pale ground with the lake glazes the Conseils describe, and the shawl's red laid in two strokes of vermilion and lake.

Frederick Augustus Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry (National Trust, Ickworth): the 'Earl-Bishop' (1730–1803), the collecting, travelling, eccentric Anglican bishop who built Ickworth and died in an outhouse in Italy — in a red coat with Vesuvius behind, painted in Naples; the Souvenirs describe his kindness and his oddity, and Ickworth's is the painter's best English-sitter portrait of the exile.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 132.5 × 105.5 cm — Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton (1765–1815), reclining on a leopard-skin in a white tunic with a red scarf, a tambourine in her hand, her hair loose, against a view of Vesuvius smoking: the first of the painter's portraits of the most painted woman in Europe, made in Naples in 1790 for Sir William Hamilton, and the best.

The sitter

Emma Hart — born Amy Lyon, a blacksmith's daughter from Cheshire, Romney's model, Charles Greville's mistress, sent to Naples in 1786 to his uncle Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy, who married her in 1791 — was the sensation of Naples for her 'attitudes': performances in shawls and tunics in which she posed as the figures of antique art, to the admiration of Goethe and of the painter, who describes them at length and with some acid: 'she had not much wit, but a great deal of talent for the attitudes'; 'her face was very fine, but her figure was not'; and 'she dressed very badly when she was not in her Greek costume'. The painter painted her four times — as a Bacchante reclining (this), as a Bacchante dancing, as Ariadne, and as the Cumaean Sibyl — and the Souvenirs say Hamilton paid a hundred louis for each and later sold them.

The picture

The Bacchante — the Bacchic follower with tambourine, loose hair and leopard-skin — was Emma's best attitude and the painter's subject: the sitter reclines in the Skavronskaia's pose, with Vesuvius instead of a cushion, and the red scarf, the white tunic and the leopard-skin are the picture's colour. The face is Emma's — the full lip, the large eyes, the famous hair — painted with the directness the painter reserved for sitters she found beautiful and not quite respectable. The volcano is Naples's signature and Hamilton's hobby.

History

Sir William Hamilton, who sold it in the 1801 sale of his collection; English collections; William Hesketh Lever, Lord Leverhulme, the soap manufacturer, who bought it for the gallery he built at Port Sunlight in memory of his wife; the Lady Lever since 1922. It is the painter's best-known picture in Britain after the Straw Hat and the Perregaux.

Seeing it

The Lady Lever hangs it among the gallery's Romneys — Emma's other painter — and the comparison is the picture's context: Romney's Emma is a muse, Vigée Le Brun's is a woman on a leopard-skin, and the difference is the one the Souvenirs make between the attitudes and the person.

What to look at

The tambourine; the leopard-skin; the hair; Vesuvius; the red scarf. Then the Romneys next door. The Hamilton sale of 1801 dispersed the four pictures; the Sibyl the painter had kept for herself; the Ariadne is in a private collection; the dancing Bacchante is untraced. The Lady Lever's is the one that has stayed in public view. The painter's own list gives it as 'Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante, reclining, with Vesuvius'; the volcano, which she climbed with Hamilton's party, appears in no other picture of hers.

Lady Hamilton as Ariadne (private collection): a small version of the painter's Ariadne — Emma reclining on the shore of Naxos in a leopard-skin, abandoned by Theseus — one of the four Hamiltons of 1790–92; the large picture is untraced, and this sketch records it.

Maria Cristina of Naples and Sicily (Museo del Prado, Madrid — formerly Museum of Modern Art): a small version of the Capodimonte Maria Cristina — the child with the dog — sent to the Spanish Bourbon relatives; the Prado's one Vigée Le Brun.

Maria Luisa of Naples and Sicily (Capodimonte): the Queen's second daughter (1773–1802), at seventeen, the future Grand Duchess of Tuscany, in white with a blue sash and loose hair — the third of the Neapolitan series; the Souvenirs found her 'the prettiest of the princesses'.

Self-portrait (Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Céramique, Rouen): a small half-length of the painter in a turban, of the Roman year — a private version of the Uffizi image, given to a friend; Rouen's picture is the French provinces' one self-portrait.

Count Pavel Stroganov (Hermitage): a small oval head of the future general and friend of Alexander I (1772–1817), at eighteen, painted in Paris — the boy who had been raised by his Jacobin tutor Romme and joined the Jacobin club as 'Citoyen Paul Ocher' before his father recalled him; the Hermitage's earliest Vigée Le Brun.

Francesco, Hereditary Prince of Naples (Capodimonte): the Queen's son (1777–1830), at thirteen, the future Francis I of the Two Sicilies, in a red coat with the Order of San Gennaro — the boy who 'would not sit', the Souvenirs say, and whose portrait was 'the hardest of the four'.

Giovanni Paisiello (Versailles): the composer (1740–1816) at his keyboard, in a fur-lined coat, looking up for inspiration with a score of his Te Deum — painted in Naples in 1790, shown at the Salon of 1791 in the painter's absence, and given to the French state; the Souvenirs say David praised it and that it 'made my reputation as a painter of men'.

Maria Teresa of Naples and Sicily (Capodimonte): the eldest daughter of Maria Carolina (1772–1807), at eighteen — the future second wife of the Emperor Francis II and the mother of Marie-Louise, Napoleon's empress — in white with a blue sash; the Neapolitan series' eldest sister.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 120 × 94 cm — Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Maria Cristina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies (1779–1849), eleven, the daughter of Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina, seated in a white dress with a blue sash, her hair loose, a hand on a dog, against a landscape: one of the series of portraits of the Neapolitan royal children the painter made in 1790 for the Queen of Naples, Marie Antoinette's sister.

Naples and the Queen's sister

Maria Carolina, the most intelligent and the most formidable of Maria Theresa's daughters, received the painter in April 1790 as her sister's painter and commissioned portraits of herself and her children — the Souvenirs describe the Queen's 'great kindness', her 'beautiful hands', and the difficulty of painting her three daughters and her son, who 'would not sit'. The series — Maria Cristina, Maria Luisa (later Grand Duchess of Tuscany), Maria Teresa (later Empress of Austria), and the Prince Francesco — is at Capodimonte, and the Maria Cristina is the best of it.

The picture

The composition is the Dauphin and Madame Royale's adapted: the child in white with a sash, the dog, the landscape; the face is a Bourbon child's — the heavy lower lip, the round cheek — painted with the painter's tenderness for children. The Neapolitan landscape ground is a rare concession to place; the handling of the dress is the wet white of the Paris years. Maria Cristina married Charles Felix of Savoy in 1807 and became Queen of Sardinia; her portrait at eleven is the record of a child the painter liked.

History

The Neapolitan royal collection; the Bourbon pictures passed to the Italian state with the Capodimonte collections; the museum since. The series hangs together in the Capodimonte's eighteenth-century rooms and is, with the Liechtenstein princesses, the largest holding of the painter's exile portraits in one place.

Seeing it

Capodimonte's room of the Neapolitan Bourbons sets the painter's children beside the Neapolitan court painters' (Angelika Kauffman's royal family of 1783 is in the same museum), and the comparison is instructive: Kauffman's children are allegories; hers are children.

What to look at

The dog; the sash; the loose hair; the lip; the landscape's blue. Then the siblings on the same wall.

The Neapolitan series

The four Neapolitan children are the painter's only royal series outside France, and their history is the Bourbons': Maria Teresa became the second wife of Francis II and Empress of Austria; Maria Luisa the Grand Duchess of Tuscany; Francesco the King of the Two Sicilies; Maria Cristina the Queen of Sardinia. The painter, who had painted the Queen of France's children three years before, painted the Queen of Naples's in the same white dresses and with the same dogs, and the two series are the catalogue's most instructive pairing: the French children would be dead or imprisoned within six years; the Neapolitan would reign. Maria Cristina's own later life — a pious queen at Turin, a widow for twenty-five years — is not in the face; the painter's child is eleven and has a dog.

Princess Vlaminska (the singer Cotelini?) (Museum of John Paul II Collection, Warsaw): a young woman with a music-sheet, identified variously as a Polish princess or the singer Cotellini — of the Roman year's theatrical and Polish clientele; the Warsaw Carroll-Porczyński collection's picture.

A Lady Making a Bouquet (Museum of John Paul II Collection, Warsaw): a young woman in white arranging flowers, half-length — a second Porczyński picture, of the Roman manner, with the flowers painted as carefully as the face.