Towards the end of 1789, on Vigée Le Brun’s first stay in Rome, she met frequently with Angelica Kauffmann, a Swiss painter and one of the founding members of London’s Royal Academy. Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac (Paris : Classiques Champion, 2015). Between 18, she published her Souvenirs, 4 three volumes interspersed with letters, reminiscences, stories of her travels, and a list of her paintings. Later in life, as she fretted over how posterity would remember her, she composed her own life story, sifting through her extraordinary personal trajectory, reconstructing her existence as a worldly woman and an artist who, armed only with her paintbrush, her daughter Julie by her side, criss-crossed all of Europe and into Russia. Her encounters provided her with the opportunity to both pen and paint a series of striking portraits. After meandering through the continent, she journeyed to London, staying nearly three years, with occasional trips to thermal spas and the country homes of the British aristocracy. From 1789 to 1805, throughout the long years of her exile, she crossed paths with dozens of British subjects. Her peregrinations took her around Europe, ending only some sixteen years later when she made her way back to France. Vigée Le Brun’s alliances with the royal court and the Polignac family made her a target for slander in revolutionary libelles, forcing her to flee at the first stirrings of the Revolution. Hors-Série (Dijon : Éditions Faton, 2021). L’art de paraître au XVIIIe siècle, L’Objet d’art. Portraiture and fashion reciprocally influenced the other. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1996). Jean-Baptiste Le Brun, Précis historique de la vie de la citoyenne Lebrun (À Paris, chez l’auteur, An II). Vigée Le Brun’s portraits of the queen and of Yolande de Polignac contributed to the fashion for the white chemise gown in Europe. In the early 1780s, French fashion continued to run towards novelty and elegance, but there was a burgeoning desire for sartorial freedom and sobriety. Their union marked the first step of her vertiginous rise in social status from a bourgeois woman of artistic origins to an intimate of the queen and France’s elite. Le Brun remained her fervent defender, though a somewhat ambiguous business ally. Though they would divorce in 1794, and despite the events surrounding the Revolution, 1 In 1776, she wed Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun, a talentless artist but skilled paintings and antiquities dealer, who encouraged her artistic endeavours. Though still quite young, she conquered Paris, her skill and charm propelling her into the limelight of worldly sociability. It was her loving father who introduced her to painting, and not long after his premature death, on Joseph Vernet’s counsel, Vigée Le Brun embarked on a career as a portraitist. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) was the daughter of Louis Vigée, a pastellist, and the elder sister of Étienne Louis Jean-Baptiste, an ambitious writer.
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