III. The Queen's painter, 1778–1789

Marie Antoinette was twenty-two when she first sat to Vigée Le Brun, in 1778, for a full-length in court dress to be sent to her mother in Vienna — Maria Theresa, who had been complaining for years that the portraits of her daughter were unsatisfactory. The painter was twenty-three. The result, the Marie Antoinette in Court Dress now in Vienna, is the most formal picture she ever made: the Queen in a silver-white grand habit with panniers, a rose in her hand, against a column and a crown on a cushion — the Rigaud-Nattier formula of the state portrait, done by someone whose talents lay elsewhere. Maria Theresa was satisfied. And the painter had what no woman painter in Europe had had: the patronage of a queen of her own age who liked her.

The Souvenirs describe the sittings with a warmth that is also, in retrospect, a defence: the Queen's 'majestic bearing', her 'dazzling complexion', her singing duets with the painter at the easel, her kindness when, one day, the painter, pregnant and ill, dropped her brushes and the Queen picked them up — 'Leave them,' she said, 'you are too far advanced in your pregnancy to stoop.' Between 1778 and 1789 Vigée Le Brun painted the Queen some thirty times, in originals and autograph repetitions: the Queen in Court Dress; the Queen 'en gaulle' or en chemise of 1783, in a white muslin dress and a straw hat, which caused the scandal of the Salon (the Queen painted in her underwear, the critics said; the Queen in Austrian cotton ruining the Lyon silk trade, said the others) and was withdrawn and replaced by the Queen with a Rose in blue-grey silk; the Queen with her children of 1787; the Queen in a blue velvet gown with a book of 1788, the last. The portraits were sent to Vienna, to Naples, to Sweden, to the royal relatives and the friends; they were the Queen's diplomatic face, and, as her reputation collapsed through the 1780s — the affaire du collier, the pamphlets, 'Madame Déficit' — they were her defence.

The royal patronage opened everything. The Queen's circle — the Polignacs, Vaudreuil, the Princesse de Lamballe, Madame Élisabeth, the Comte d'Artois — sat to her; the court's financiers (Calonne, Beaujon); the actresses and singers (Dugazon, Saint-Huberty, Todi); the foreign visitors (the Prince of Nassau, the Polish Potockas); the philosophes' widows; the painter's own friends, Hubert Robert and the Abbé Delille. Her prices rose to the highest in Paris: she says she received 12,000 livres for a portrait by the late 1780s, and that she had earned a million before she left France. In 1783, by the Queen's intervention and over the resistance of the Académie — whose director, Pierre, objected both to a woman and to a dealer's wife — she was received into the Académie royale on 31 May, on the same day as her rival Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, with a mythological morceau de réception, Peace Bringing Back Abundance, that was designed to place her among the history painters rather than the portraitists. She was twenty-eight. Four women had been admitted in the Académie's whole history; the statutes of 1770 had limited the number to four at any time.

The Salon of 1783 was her debut and her scandal; the Salon of 1785 consolidated her; the Salon of 1787 was her triumph — the Marie Antoinette and her Children, the Self-portrait with Julie 'à la grecque', and the Marquise de Pezay and the Marquise de Rougé with her sons, all hung together, drew the crowds and the critics, and the Self-portrait, with its open mouth showing teeth, drew a pedantic complaint from the Mémoires secrets that a smile with teeth was 'an affectation which artists, connoisseurs and persons of taste are unanimous in condemning'. The teeth are the manner's signature and its argument: a face caught in the act of being pleasant to you.

IV. A Greek supper and a reputation

Two episodes of the 1780s fixed the painter's public character, and she reports both. The first was the 'Greek supper' of 1788 (or thereabouts) at the Hôtel Le Brun, improvised, she says, on a whim after reading the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis: the guests in tunics and laurel, the furniture in the antique taste, the food served from Etruscan vases, the poet Lebrun-Pindare declaiming — and the story, which reached Versailles and then Russia, that the evening had cost twenty thousand francs, when it had cost fifteen. The second was the gossip about Calonne, the controller-general of finances, whose portrait she painted in 1784 and who was said to have paid for it with a box of bonbons filled with banknotes, or with the Hôtel Le Brun itself, or with her favours. The pamphlets of the 1780s — the same ones that destroyed the Queen — made the painter a figure of scandal: the dealer's wife who slept with ministers, the parvenue who gave Greek suppers, the 'Mme Le Brun' of the Correspondance secrète. She answered in the Souvenirs with indignation and with a list of the friends who knew better.

The importance of this for the work is real. Vigée Le Brun's manner — the softness, the openness, the intimacy — was read in her own time as the manner of a woman available, and she spent the rest of her life insisting on its innocence. The portraits' refusal of the pose of rank, their preference for muslin and loose hair over silk and powder, their sitters' look of having been caught at ease, were a social innovation as well as a pictorial one: the toilette of the Petit Trianon, the cult of nature and sensibility, Rousseau's mothers nursing their own children, applied to the image of the aristocracy. The Queen's white dress was a political act before it was a painting, and the painter who gave it its image was held responsible.

V. The manner: how a Vigée Le Brun is painted

A chapter on technique, because the painter's methods were both more deliberate and more interesting than the reputation for facility suggests, and because she wrote about them — in the Souvenirs, and in the Conseils pour la peinture du portrait, a short text of advice to a young painter that the memoirs include.

The sitter. 'Before beginning, talk with the sitter'; observe the pose she takes naturally; 'never let the sitter look straight at you' in the first sittings, but make her look slightly to one side; put the light from above and a little to the left; place the sitter 'against a plain ground, grey or brownish, never white'; seat women, whose figures are better seated; let the hands be occupied. These are the rules of the manner as a system, and they account for its consistency: the three-quarter turn with the head brought round, the hands with a shawl or a flower or a book, the plain dark ground, the light from the upper left falling on the brow and the cheek.

The ground and the palette. She painted on canvas with a light, warm ground — often a pale grey or buff, as the Conseils advise — and on a palette that was deliberately restricted for flesh: lead white, Naples yellow, yellow ochre, vermilion, a red lake, a little burnt sienna, ultramarine or Prussian blue, ivory black, and — her own emphasis — no earth greens in the flesh. The advice was Greuze's, and the practice was to build the flesh in a thin first painting, frottis, over the ground, let it dry, and finish with semi-opaque touches and glazes of lake for the lips and cheeks and blue-grey half-tones under the eyes. The skin of her sitters — which is the thing everyone notices — is the result of light ground, thin paint and a lake glaze: a luminosity that comes from beneath.

Drawing. She drew little on the canvas — a few strokes of chalk or thin paint for the placing — and composed with the brush; the examinations of the Louvre's pictures show a painter who worked fast and changed little. The proportions of the head are slightly enlarged in relation to the body, the eyes a little bigger than nature, the neck long; these are the 'flatteries' of the manner, and she admits them in the Conseils: 'one must not make the sitter uglier than she is'.

The fabrics. The muslins, the satins, the velvet, the cashmere shawl — she painted them with a broad, wet, rapid brush that has been compared to Gainsborough's and that is the most 'painterly' thing in her work; the Duchesse de Polignac's straw hat, the Comtesse de la Châtre's white dress, the Countess Skavronskaia's shawl are passages of virtuoso handling that the attention to the faces can make one miss. The fur, the feathers and the lace are done with a few dry strokes; the hair, unpowdered in the 1780s by her own preference, is a soft mass with a few highlights.

Repetitions and the studio. She made autograph repetitions of her royal and her most successful portraits — the Queen with a Rose exists in at least four versions, the Self-portrait in a Straw Hat in several — and she had assistants for the copies that the court ordered in quantity; the catalogue's attribution problems come mostly from this. Her own account is that she painted 'three portraits a week' in her best years, which is an exaggeration of a real speed: the Russian portraits of the 1790s, a hundred of them in six years, were painted at a rate that only a method could sustain.

Pastel. She began in pastel, her father's medium, and returned to it through her life — the early self-portraits, the Innocence taking refuge in the arms of Justice of 1779, the heads of the 1790s — but oil was her instrument, and her pastel, unlike La Tour's, was a sketching medium rather than a finished one.

The manner's limits are as clear as its virtues. The range of expression is narrow — the pleasant, the tender, the sprightly, the melancholy-pleasant — and the sitters tend to look alike, as the sitters of any successful portraitist do; the men are less good than the women, because the manner was made for the female face and the men are fitted to it; the history pictures are weak, because the manner has no room for action. The best defence of it is the faces themselves: the Hubert Robert of 1788, which is the most vigorous picture she painted and the one in which the manner is abandoned; the Madame Grand; the Comtesse de la Châtre; the Skavronskaia; the two self-portraits with Julie. In these the formula is a frame for an observation, and the observation is exact.