The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Most attractive of all the portraitures of this period is the woman artist Madame Elizabeth Louise Vigée Lebrun (1755-1842). Her father, a portrait-painter himself, died when she was only twelve years old, and his daughter carried on his practice almost at once, for when she was only fifteen she was already painting portraits with success and talent. While still young she married Lebrus, a prosperous and enterprising picture-dealer, who managed her affairs well, and whose stock of Old Masters afforded the young artist many models which she studied with good results. In 1783 Vigée Lebrun was admitted to the French Academy, and during the last years of the French monarchy she was a favorite at Court and painted several portraits of Marie Antoinette and her children. In 1789, alarmed at the way things were going in France, she went to Italy, where she was received with enthusiasm and made a member of the Academies of Rome, Parma, and Bologna. Thence she went to Vienna, where she stayed three years, and subsequently visiting Prague, Dresden, Berlin, and St Petersburg, she only returned to France in 1801. Thus she escaped the Revolution altogether and saw little of the Empire, for about the time fo the Peace of Amiens she came to England, where she stayed three years, and then visited Holland and Switzerland, finally returning to France in 1809.

Entirely untouched by the Revolution and by the wave of Classicism which followed it, Mme. Vigée Lebrun was a cosmopolitan artist whose art belonged to no particular country, and whose style had more in common with English Romanticism than with the asceticism then in vogue in France. Among all her portraits none is more charming than the many she painted of herself, and of these the best known and most popular is the winning of ‘Portrait of the Artist and her Daughter’ at the Louvre. Though in time she belongs to the revolutionary era, Mme. Lebrun is, as regards her art, a survival of the old aristocratic portrait-painters of monarchical France.

The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)