"The Heart of Art"
Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun (1755-1842)
This is the portrayal of the important 18th century portrait artist and is based upon her written memoirs, Souvenirs. Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun was a rarity for her time – a working woman artist. During her life, she painted more than 800 portraits of royalty, nobles and the elite in many countries, including 32 of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and her family. This presentation is a telling plot with the guillotine, broken marriages, escapes to safety and follows the destiny of a woman artist shaped by necessity.
Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun was a daughter of an artist and served as painter to Queen Marie Antoinette until the French Revolution forced her into an exile which lasted 12 years. She was totally devoted to her art, ambitious for professional recognition, social status and financial success. She attained all of her ambitions to a remarkable degree. She was befriended by monarchs and royal circles in all the countries in which she lived and worked.
Her memoirs "Souvenirs" provide an interesting view of the training of artists at the end of the period dominated by the royal academies. She wrote: "All that I have endured convinces me that my only happiness has been in painting."
Below is the monumental portrait of the artist's only child at age nineteen and was painted in St. Petersburg, Russia where they lived in exile from 1795-1801. With charming grace and allegorical implications, this portrait stands at the end of the Revolutionary era and personifies much of what portraiture was about at that time. It hangs aspart of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL.
