Her work celebrates the most engaging qualities of the Enlightenment: a natural elegance and a new attitude, strongly influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, toward motherly love. Vigée Le Brun is known first and foremost as the queen’s portraitist and she remained attached to the values of the ancien régime. The unbreakable bond with Marie Antoinette certainly did nothing to help her reputation in Republican France. The quality of her work has never been called into question, though there can be no denying a certain tradition of mistrust toward female painters. What is the reason for this lack of interest in the artist’s homeland? The Paris show, somewhat scaled down, is now on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. The only comparable show of her work prior to this one was mounted more than thirty years ago at the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, through the instigation of the art historian Joseph Baillio. It comes as something of a surprise that we have had to wait until 2015 for a comprehensive exhibition in France of the work of Madame Vigée Le Brun-perhaps the most gifted French portraitist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an artist who gave posterity the most enduring image of Queen Marie Antoinette. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: Self-Portrait, 1790 Galleria degli Uffizi, Corridoio Vasariano, Florence
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