VI. The Académie question: women, institutions, and the rivalry

The reception of 31 May 1783 was an event in the history of institutions as much as in a career, and it needs a fuller account. The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture had admitted women from its foundation — fifteen between 1648 and 1770, most of them pastellists or miniaturists, wives and daughters of academicians — but in 1770 it had fixed their number at four, 'not as a matter of right, but as a favour', and by 1783 the four places were, in effect, the institution's concession to a sex it did not wish to train. Vigée Le Brun's candidacy faced two objections: she was a woman, and she was married to a picture-dealer, which the statutes barred — the Académie forbade its members to trade. The director Pierre, the First Painter, opposed her on the second ground with the first in mind; the Comte d'Angiviller, the King's minister for the arts, hesitated; the Queen intervened; the King ordered; and the Académie received her, on the same day as Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, with a mythological picture that was meant to prove she was a history painter and that was catalogued, on the Académie's insistence, without a category — she was received 'sans classe', neither history painter nor portraitist, which was the institution's way of admitting the royal will and withholding its own.

The pairing with Labille-Guiard — two women on one day, so that the four places were filled and the question closed — was the press's gift. The two were compared at every Salon: Vigée Le Brun the Queen's painter, soft, rich, suspected of frivolity; Labille-Guiard the Mesdames' painter, severe, exact, the better draughtswoman, who stayed through the Revolution, painted Robespierre, petitioned the Académie in 1790 for the unlimited admission of women, and died in 1803 having lost her great picture of the Comte de Provence to the Terror's fires. Their rivalry was real — the Souvenirs do not mention Labille-Guiard once, which is its own statement — and it was also a frame: the culture of the 1780s could hold two women painters by opposing them, and it could not hold more. Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Vigée Le Brun's pupil, would be the next, and the Revolution's closing of the Académie in 1793 and the Salon's opening to all in 1791 changed the terms of the question without answering it.

The episode's importance for the work is in the morceau de réception. Peace Bringing Back Abundance — two allegorical women, the one in dark drapery with an olive branch leading the other, blonde and bare-breasted with a cornucopia — is a competent Bolognese pastiche of the kind the Académie prized and the painter did not do well; it was her bid for the rank of history painter, and it shows, by its weakness, that the ambition was for the rank rather than the work. She knew what she was. The Self-portrait with Julie of 1786, which she showed three years later, was the real statement: a portrait — of herself, as a mother, à la grecque — that borrowed the history painter's Raphael and put it to the portraitist's use. It was the most admired picture of the Salon. The Académie had its categories; the public had hers.

VII. The gallery of the 1780s: who sat, and why

A portraitist's œuvre is a social document before it is anything else, and the Paris decade of Vigée Le Brun's work is a census of the Queen's France. It is worth walking through it, because the catalogue that follows is organised by date and the reader will want the map.

The royal family first: the Queen, thirty times; the King's sister Madame Élisabeth, in several versions, a plain, devout young woman whom the painter made pretty; the King's aunts Mesdames Adélaïde and Victoire, painted in the 1790s after their flight; the children — the Dauphin and Madame Royale of 1784 in a garden, the Dauphin in a blue coat, the most affecting child portrait of the decade; the Comte d'Artois's wife; the Orléans — the Duchesse de Chartres, later d'Orléans, a melancholy woman married to the future Philippe-Égalité, whom the painter portrayed three times, and who survived the Revolution to become the mother of a king. The Queen's friends next, and this is the group for which the painter is the principal witness: Yolande de Polignac, the governess of the royal children and the most hated woman in France after the Queen, painted in 1782 in a straw hat and in 1783 with a music-book, the softest of all the faces; her sister-in-law the Comtesse Diane; the Comte de Vaudreuil, the Polignacs' lover and the painter's patron and friend, a collector and a wit, whose portrait of 1784 is the best male portrait of the Paris years after the Hubert Robert; the Princesse de Lamballe; the Baronne de Crussol with her music; the Duchesse de Guiche; the Comtesse de Ségur. Then the money — Calonne, the controller-general, in his robes, with the scandal attached; Nicolas Beaujon, the banker whose hôtel became the Élysée; the financier Boutin; the Perregaux banking family, whose wife's portrait of 1789 is in the Wallace Collection — and the stage: Madame Dugazon as Nina, the hit of 1786; Madame Saint-Huberty, the great soprano, as Dido; Luísa Todi, the Portuguese mezzo; the actor Préville as Mascarille; the composer Grétry; Paisiello, later, in Naples, at his keyboard. And the artists and writers: Joseph Vernet in 1778, the first of the friends; Hubert Robert in 1788, palette in hand, the most alive of all her men; the sculptor Lemoyne; the Abbé Delille.

Two observations about the list. The first is that it is overwhelmingly female, and that its women are painted as the painter painted herself: in muslin and straw, hair loose, in the 'natural' style that the Petit Trianon made the fashion and the pamphlets made the scandal. The Vigée Le Brun portrait of the 1780s is the visual form of a social programme — Rousseau's sensibility, Marie Antoinette's informality, the English garden and the robe en gaulle — and the sitters who adopted it were adopting a politics of the heart that the Revolution would read as frivolity. The second is that the list is the Souvenirs' list: the painter's memoir is organised around the people she painted, and the portraits are the memoir's illustrations. To read the book and look at the catalogue together is to see a world from inside its sittings.

VIII. The self-portraits, and Julie

No painter of the century, not even Rembrandt's heirs, painted herself so often or to such purpose. The self-portraits run from the pastel of sixteen to the last of 1808, and they are of three kinds. The first are professional statements: the Straw Hat of 1782, with the palette; the Uffizi self-portrait of 1790, at the easel, painting the Queen; the Hermitage self-portrait of 1800, at the easel again, painting the Empress; the Artist at Work versions. These say I am a painter to a world that doubted it — the Uffizi picture was made for the Grand Duke's gallery of painters' self-portraits, where the painter hung with Rosalba and Kauffman and, for the first time, three women were in the room. The second are portraits of a charming woman: the 1781 self-portrait in a plumed hat, the 1790 self-portrait in a turban, the small heads she gave to friends; these are the manner applied to its inventor, and they are the evidence that the manner was, in part, a self-description — the painter painted her sitters as she painted herself, and the likeness between her face and theirs is not an accident. The third are the mother: the two Self-portraits with Julie (1786 and 1789), which were the most popular pictures she ever showed and which gave the century its image of the modern mother — unpowdered, in Greek dress, embracing a child who embraces her.

Julie, born in 1780, is the subject of a parallel series: the two-year-old of 1782 (Stockholm), the child looking in a mirror of 1785 (Met), the girl in a rose-crown of 1792 (Parma), the Bather of 1792, the girl with a guitar of 1797 (Geneva), the Flora of 1799 (St Petersburg, Florida). They are the tenderest pictures of the career and they end in the Russian quarrel of 1800, when the daughter married against the mother's will and the mother wrote, forty years later, that 'all the charm of my life was gone'. The pictures of Julie are, in this light, a record of a love that was also an exercise of possession — the painter made her daughter the century's ideal child, and the daughter grew up and left — and the Souvenirs' account of the estrangement is the book's one passage of undefended pain.

The self-portraits also answer, in their own way, the critics' charge that she was painted by others: a painter who shows herself at the easel, brush in hand, canvas half-done, in picture after picture, is making an argument about authorship that the pictures themselves prove. The 2015 retrospective hung a room of them, and the room was the exhibition's most persuasive.