Self-portrait by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. 1790. Uffizi Museum, Florence • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS In 1790, in Florence, the great artist of the 18 th century Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842) made her self-portrait on the road to exile she faced during the French Revolution. Now kept in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, it is one of those seemingly innocuous works, but which we delight in as we look at them and contextualize them. The “painter” friend of the Queen Thus, at first sight, this very beautiful painting represents an elegant, even charming woman painter, in the process of portraying another woman (the face sketched on the canvas in the background). In this device, the viewer officiates in a way as a model, since the "painter", according to the expression of the time, observes the model/viewer head-on, whose features she wishes to reproduce. Indeed, the artist scrutinizes the face which, in this subtle mise en abyme, looks at the painting. However, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun had until then been the official portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, queen and wife of Louis XVI, whose regime was experiencing, at the time of the painting's completion, violent shocks. In 1790, the French polity was still a monarchy – constitutional, however – and the king still wore the crown proudly, for he had not yet attempted to flee to ally himself with the counter-revolution and neighboring foreign powers. /P> The alliance of the portraitist and her favorite model was therefore not yet playing a radical role against the career of the artist, and all the less so in Italy, where the king's sisters were at the same time who had left France in the same circumstances as Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. A very subtle staging Also, the female silhouette that takes shape on the canvas on which the artist works is similar, in the imagination of the time, to the queen, who was also a benefactor to the female painter, since in 1783 she had her named at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, an exclusively male institution – or almost – before this royal intervention. Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's staging gives a place of choice – of queen – to each admirer standing in front of the painting. In doing so, and indirectly, the artist anticipates the popular sovereignty specific to democracy which will effectively replace monarchical sovereignty in 1792... The woman painter will always retain her loyalty to the Ancien Régime. But on an individual basis and failing to enroll in a claimed political approach, she will repeatedly cross the limits of conservative propriety by assuming, despite the mockery involving her sexual identity (she was called a hermaphrodite monster by critics contemporary), an exceptional European career as well as a fulfilling motherhood. Because aware of the cliché assuming the inability of women to juggle work and motherhood, she indeed worked, in images and actions, to prove the contrary, despite the vicissitudes of life:the divorce from her husband , the art dealer Lebrun engaged in the Revolution, and the premature death of their child Julie (1780-1819). Find out more Freedom, Equality, Exclusion:Women Painters in the Revolution (1770-1804), M.-J. Bonnet, Vendémiaire, 2013. As much an artist as a mother The self-portrait in the Louvre, produced a year before that in Florence and included as a counterpart to the second, is the expression of this double ambition and of Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's opposition to the necessary quartering of her double status of mother and artist. In his eyes and in his paintings, she is one and the same woman, exceptionally talented, who leaves nothing to chance and sacrifices nothing.
