Before turning to the landscape painters Joseph Vernet and Hubert
Robert, we must close the chapter of eighteenth-century portraiture
with Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), since her art,
although her life extended far into the nineteenth century, belongs
essentially to the degenerate days of the _ancien régime_—an art not
devoid of grace, but exceeding in shallowness and insipidity the
shallowest and most insipid productions of pre-Davidian days. Of the
many masters from whom Vigée, herself the daughter of a painter,
received advice, Greuze appears to be the one with whom she was
most in sympathy. Married at an early age to Le Brun, a painter and
picture-dealer from whom she was divorced after many years of wretched
conjugal life, her career, of which she has left a full account in
her autobiography, was one of adventure and truly extraordinary
professional success.
She was the favourite painter of Marie Antoinette, had to leave Paris
during the Terror, and made an almost triumphal progress from Court
to Court before she definitely settled in Paris in 1809. At Naples,
Vienna, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, and other centres,
Royalty and the world of fashion crowded to her studio; and her art
even gained the unstinted approval of a judge like Sir Joshua Reynolds,
which is the more surprising as Vigée Le Brun’s colour was almost
invariably cold and unsympathetic. Her personal charms may have been
partly responsible for her universal success, if reliance is to be
placed on the questionable honesty of her flattering brush from which
the Louvre owns two _Portraits of the Artist and her Daughter_ (No. 521
and No. 522, Plate XLIV.). Among her other pictures in the Louvre are
the _Peace bringing Abundance_ (No. 520), her reception piece at the
Academy, and a portrait of her early friend and master, _Joseph Vernet_
(No. 525).
[Illustration:
PLATE XLIII.—JEAN-BAPTISTE GREUZE
(1725-1805)