Souvenirs: From a Memoir

(Paperback)

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A selection from the memoir of Elisabeth Louise Vige Le Brun, the renowned eighteenth-century French portraitist and one of the most important women painters in art history

In her memoir, Elisabeth Louise Vige Le Brun offers a candid and thoroughly enjoyable account of her life and art. She relates her encounters among the royalty and aristocracy she painted--including, most famously, her patron Marie Antoinette--and the effusive reception they extended to her across Europe. Forced to flee during the French Revolution, Vige Le Brun traveled through Italy, Russia, Germany, and England, returning twelve years later to France under Napoleon I. These pages demonstrate her unflagging creativity during unstable times and her remarkable savvy. Her observations provide unique insight into the art world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a time when women were rarely allowed success.

In her introduction to this volume, the scholar Anne Higonnet conveys Vige Le Brun's unique position at a turning point in the art world, as well as the larger world beyond, and navigates in particular how one retroactively reconstructs a relationship to a world-changing revolution.

Author Bio

lisabeth Louise Vige Le Brun (1755-1842) was a celebrated French painter at the turn of the nineteenth century and one of few women artists admitted to the Acadmie royale de peinture et de sculpture. She is well known for her portraits of the aristocracy and royal families, including her patron Marie Antoinette. She had contributed more than fifty pictures to the Salons, including history paintings and allegories, by 1789. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, she fled Paris and traveled across Europe and Russia, continuing to paint. Vige Le Brun returned to Paris in 1802, and in 1825, settled in Louveciennes, she set out writing and publishing her memoir.

Anne Higonnet is a professor of art history at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Liberty, Equality, Fashion: the Women Who Styled the French Revolution (2024). She has written five other books as well as many essays, and has directed two book-scale digital projects. Her research has been supported by Getty, Guggenheim, Social Science Research Council, and Harvard-Radcliffe Institute fellowships, as well as by grants from the Mellon, Howard, and Kress Foundations.