XVI. Four pictures, closely

Self-portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782 (London). The reply to Rubens. The Chapeau de Paille in Antwerp had shown a young woman in a hat with a feather, lit from below by the reflected light of the sky; Vigée Le Brun saw it on her Flemish trip of 1781 and painted herself in the same pose, in a plain white dress and a black shawl, a straw hat with a feather and flowers, a palette and brushes in her hand, against an open sky. The point is the light: the face is lit by the sky, with no shadow from the hat, as in Rubens, and the effect — the clarity of the flesh against the blue — is the manner's founding demonstration. The palette in the hand is the claim: I am a painter. The picture exists in two autograph versions (London and a private collection); the London one was bought by the National Gallery in 1897 and is the most famous image of a woman painter in the world.

Marie Antoinette and her Children, 1787 (Versailles). The state commission, from d'Angiviller's office, at 18,000 livres, to restore the Queen's image as a mother: the Queen in red velvet with a plumed hat, the Dauphin Louis-Joseph pointing at the cradle, Madame Royale at her arm, the infant Duc de Normandie on her lap; the setting the Salle de la Paix at Versailles, with the Galerie des Glaces beyond; the composition a pyramid, the model Raphael's Holy Families and the Madonna della Sedia. The cradle was to have held the Queen's fourth child, Sophie, who died in June 1787 at eleven months; the painter removed her and left the cradle empty, with the Dauphin's pointing gesture now a memorial. The picture was hung at the Salon in August; the Queen, who had not seen it, came to the Louvre to look; the Dauphin died in June 1789; the boy on the lap became Louis XVII and died in the Temple in 1795. The painting was hidden during the Revolution and returned to Versailles under Louis-Philippe.

Self-portrait with Julie, 1789 (Louvre). The second of the two self-portraits with the daughter: the first (1786), à la grecque, in a white tunic with a red band, the child on the mother's knee, the mother smiling with open mouth; the second (1789), in a white chemise dress and a red shawl with a turban, the child clinging to the mother's neck and looking out, the mother looking at the viewer with a tenderness that is also a pose — the Madonna of the century's cult of maternity, Rousseau's Émile in paint. The picture hung at the Salon of 1789 and was left in Paris when the painter fled; it was seized as émigré property and entered the Louvre, where it has been since. The Souvenirs recall the sitter, at nine, as 'beautiful as an angel'; the painter's relations with the daughter she painted here would end in estrangement.

Countess Skavronskaia, 1790 (Paris, Jacquemart-André). The Neapolitan picture of the Russian ambassador's wife — Catherine Engelhardt, niece and reputed mistress of Potemkin, whom the painter found 'as lazy as she was beautiful', spending her days on a sofa in a wrapper, with a slave at her feet to tell her stories. The portrait shows her so: reclining against a cushion in a white dress with a striped shawl, a hand at her cheek, the other on a cushion, the eyes half-closed, the mouth in a half-smile; the pose is the manner's languor made total, and the handling of the shawl and the cushion is the painter at her most fluent. A second version of 1796, in the Louvre, shows the same woman in Petersburg, less happy. The Jacquemart-André picture is, for many viewers, the most beautiful thing she painted.

XVII. How to look at a Vigée Le Brun

Look at the eyes first, then the mouth. The eyes are slightly enlarged and very lightly glazed with a blue-grey shadow below, so that they appear moist; the mouth is nearly always parted, often with the teeth showing — the 1787 scandal — and the combination is the manner's whole apparatus for address. The sitter has just noticed you and is about to speak.

Look at the turn. The shoulders go one way and the head comes round the other; the hands are occupied; the body is seated or half-seated. The pose was designed to give the face its maximum animation with the minimum of formality, and it is the same, with variations, in four hundred pictures.

Look at the skin. Against the plain dark or neutral ground, the flesh is lit from the upper left and painted thin over a light ground with glazes of red lake at the lips, cheeks and fingertips; this is the luminosity that Greuze taught and that she perfected. Compare the skin of a Vigée Le Brun with that of a Labille-Guiard, which is denser and cooler, or of a David, which is harder; the difference is a theory of the face.

Look at the fabric. The muslins, the shawls, the feathers, the fur, the straw: painted fast, wet, with a loaded brush, they are the painter's release from the discipline of the face, and they are where her pleasure shows.

Look at the ground. It is plain — grey, brown, a dark curtain, a patch of sky — and it is there so that nothing competes with the face. When there is a setting (the Versailles portraits, the Neapolitan volcanoes, the Russian columns), it is a sign of rank, not a place.

And then ask who the sitter was, because the catalogue that follows is a census of a class in its last decade and its exile, and the faces, for all their sameness, are the faces of particular people on the eve of particular catastrophes. The Duchesse de Polignac died in Vienna in December 1793, two months after the Queen; the Princesse de Lamballe was torn apart by the mob in September 1792; the Comte de Vaudreuil lived to be a peer of the Restoration; Calonne died in 1802; the Dauphin, the boy pointing at the cradle, in 1789; the baby, in 1795. The painter who gave them the look of people about to speak outlived them all, and wrote down what they had said.

Coda

She asked for four words on her grave — Ici, enfin, je repose — and they are the epitaph of a life that had been, from the age of fifteen, a labour of pleasing: six hundred and sixty portraits, by her count, of the most exacting clientele in Europe, in a manner designed to make each of them look at once like themselves and like the century's idea of an amiable person. The manner was a formula; the formula was a theory of human charm; and the theory was tested, as no other painter's was, across the whole map of the ancien régime in the years it was being dismantled. What survives is a gallery of faces — the Queen thirty times, the daughter ten, the painter herself twenty — that constitute the most complete portrait of a vanished world by anyone who belonged to it. The catalogue that follows goes through them in order, from the pastel of a sixteen-year-old looking at herself in the rue Saint-Honoré to the last portrait of a Madame Baudin in 1835, and the order is the story: Paris, the Queen, the road, the courts, the long return.