Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun is a famous French artist who had to flee from death during the years of the revolution.

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun French artist of the late 18th first half of the 19th centuries, a brilliant master of portraiture. She also painted hundreds of landscapes and a number of allegorical paintings.

Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun was a highly sought-after artist and throughout her professional career had no shortage of clients. Over her long life, she created many portrait images of women representatives of the highest nobility of European society and persons of royal blood.

Biography

Elisabeth Vigee was born on April 16, 1755 in Paris. Her father Louis was a mediocre artist and a good hairdresser, and her mother came from a family of simple peasants. Two years after the birth of his daughter, the boy Etienne appeared in the family, who later became a famous playwright. Until the age of six, little Elizabeth grew up in the village, where her parents gave her to be raised by her peasant relatives. And then the father attached his daughter to the school at the monastery de la Trinite in the suburbs of Paris.

It was the father who first noticed the girl’s obvious ability to draw and was very pleased with this circumstance. In May 1767, barely 12 years old, Elizabeth’s father died suddenly from blood poisoning.

However, the mother of the future artist Jeanne Vigee did not remain an inconsolable widow for long. Six months after the death of her husband, she married a second time. Unfortunately, the stepfather turned out to be a very stingy person and his relationship with his stepdaughter did not work out.

Painting training

Soon the young artist began attending private classes with Gabriel Briard, whose workshop was located in the royal palace of the Louvre.

The first surviving painting of the artist is dated 1770 it was a portrait of her mother Jeanne Meissen. Then the girl’s family moved to a new apartment in the center of Paris. And Elizabeth began to paint custom-made portraits, but her stepfather appropriated all the income from creative activity as a guardian.

Despite the fact that the artist was admitted to the Academy of St. Luke already in 1774, her stepfather and mother completely controlled her personal life. Wanting to break out of this situation, in January 1776, Elisabeth agreed to marry Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun. From that moment on, she became known as Madame Vigée-Lebrun. Unfortunately, this marriage was unsuccessful. Relations between the spouses did not work out and most of their lives they lived separately. In this marriage, the daughter Julie was born, who for many years accompanied her mother on trips. The second child died in infancy.

Career

In 1778 Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun became the official artist of the French Queen Marie Antoinette. Over the next eleven years, she painted many portraits of the wife of Louis XVI. But the French Revolution of 1789 put an end to the carefree life. And the artist and her daughter fled to Italy, leaving their wealth in the care of her husband.

Thus began the long journey of Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun around Europe. While at home, her name was blacklisted for emigrants. She lived in Italy for three years, visited Rome, Naples, Florence and Venice, and then left for Vienna. Then, at the invitation of the Russian ambassador, she went to St. Petersburg, where she and her daughter spent the next six years.

Finally, in 1800, her name was removed from the black list, and she was able to return to France. Many of the artist’s friends were executed in the midst of revolutionary terror, and the art market was in a deplorable state.

At the final stage of her career, Elizabeth became interested in the landscape genre, she occasionally traveled around the country and made sketches.