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Lot Essay
Daughter of the minor portraitist Louis Vigée (1715-1767), Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun took up her father's profession at the age of fifteen, and her mother and younger brother Etiénne were among her first sitters. Her mother, née Jeanne Maissin (1728-1800), was a fashionable hairdresser in Paris who married, seven months after Louis Vigée's death in 1767, the goldsmith Jacques François Le Sèvre (1724-1810). Vigée Le Brun recounts in her Memoirs (published 1835-37) that early in her career she painted three portraits of her mother: the first was a large pastel representing her as a Sultana, now lost, while a second, also lost and long misattributed to Watteau (but recently identified by Joseph Baillio, 1982, op. cit.), depicted Jeanne, bust-length and in lost-profile, seen from behind; the third is the present lot. One of the artist's most graceful early works, this oval canvas depicts the aging Jeanne Le Sèvre wearing a luxurious white satin pelisse edged in swan's feathers. The young painter -- by her own admission largely self-taught -- was obviously testing her skills by creating a society portrait in the manner of the most fashionable portrait painter of the moment, Duplessis.
'My mother was very beautiful,' an elderly Vigée Le Brun remembered. 'You can see it for yourself if you look at the pastel of her by my father and also the oil that I did of her much later. That portrait is an oval bust that I painted from life...' (Memoirs, I, p. 6). The portrait is a touching example of the affection and tact with which the 20-year-old painter, herself a famous beauty, was able to convey Jeanne's fading charms, a skill she would often be called upon to deploy. Apparent is Vigée Le Brun's genius for capturing the character of a sitter with arresting immediacy and for reproducing both flesh and fabric with delicate, luminous glazing.
The portrait of Jeanne was widely admired and helped launch Vigée Le Brun's meteoric rise. 'I had only recently finished the portrait of my mother' she recalled, 'and its praises were being sung in Society. Soon the Duchess [de Chartres] sent for me to paint her in her home. She inspired everyone in her entourage with her interest in my talent and...from then on I received a succession of great ladies from the court...' (Memoirs, I, pp. 22-23). In her Memoirs, the artist includes the present portrait in a list of works painted between 1768 and 1772, but this was almost certainly a slip of memory, as both the style of the painting and the appearance of the sitter suggest a date closer to 1775-78, as has been posited by Joseph Baillio. The artist composed her memoirs near the end of her life, more than half a century after her earliest works were painted, and she sometimes relied on memory alone when preparing the book.
Until it reappeared at auction in 1985, the present painting was believed to have been destroyed at the end of the 19th century and its composition was known through two copies made for descendants of the painter's brother. Vigée Le Brun had been sentimentally attached to the portrait of her mother, and it remained in her possession until her death in 1842, hanging during her final years in one of the sitting rooms of her apartment on the rue Saint-Lazare. In all likelihood, as Baillio has noted, it subsequently became the property of her brother's daughter, Madame Rivière, née Caroline Vigée, who inherited most of her aunt's estate. At some point in the second half of the 19th century, the portrait was acquired by the Comtesse de la Ferronays, in whose sale it appeared in 1897; by that time, the sitter's true identity had been lost and it was thought to depict a member of the la Ferronays family.
The present portrait will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Vigée Le Brun being prepared by Joseph Baillio. We are grateful to Joseph Baillio for his assistance.
'My mother was very beautiful,' an elderly Vigée Le Brun remembered. 'You can see it for yourself if you look at the pastel of her by my father and also the oil that I did of her much later. That portrait is an oval bust that I painted from life...' (Memoirs, I, p. 6). The portrait is a touching example of the affection and tact with which the 20-year-old painter, herself a famous beauty, was able to convey Jeanne's fading charms, a skill she would often be called upon to deploy. Apparent is Vigée Le Brun's genius for capturing the character of a sitter with arresting immediacy and for reproducing both flesh and fabric with delicate, luminous glazing.
The portrait of Jeanne was widely admired and helped launch Vigée Le Brun's meteoric rise. 'I had only recently finished the portrait of my mother' she recalled, 'and its praises were being sung in Society. Soon the Duchess [de Chartres] sent for me to paint her in her home. She inspired everyone in her entourage with her interest in my talent and...from then on I received a succession of great ladies from the court...' (Memoirs, I, pp. 22-23). In her Memoirs, the artist includes the present portrait in a list of works painted between 1768 and 1772, but this was almost certainly a slip of memory, as both the style of the painting and the appearance of the sitter suggest a date closer to 1775-78, as has been posited by Joseph Baillio. The artist composed her memoirs near the end of her life, more than half a century after her earliest works were painted, and she sometimes relied on memory alone when preparing the book.
Until it reappeared at auction in 1985, the present painting was believed to have been destroyed at the end of the 19th century and its composition was known through two copies made for descendants of the painter's brother. Vigée Le Brun had been sentimentally attached to the portrait of her mother, and it remained in her possession until her death in 1842, hanging during her final years in one of the sitting rooms of her apartment on the rue Saint-Lazare. In all likelihood, as Baillio has noted, it subsequently became the property of her brother's daughter, Madame Rivière, née Caroline Vigée, who inherited most of her aunt's estate. At some point in the second half of the 19th century, the portrait was acquired by the Comtesse de la Ferronays, in whose sale it appeared in 1897; by that time, the sitter's true identity had been lost and it was thought to depict a member of the la Ferronays family.
The present portrait will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Vigée Le Brun being prepared by Joseph Baillio. We are grateful to Joseph Baillio for his assistance.