“I hear too much, I see too much, and I notice everything”: Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, an Artist’s Ailment
Florence, 1792: during her trip to Italy the French painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun finds herself for the second time in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. During her stay, she pays an official visit to the Museum of Felice Fontana, where the naturalist has assembled his renowned collection of anatomical wax models. There, Elisabeth is profoundly unsettled by a disassemblable model of a woman. In the event she were to meet up with Fontana later on, Elisabeth decides to document the adverse reaction she has experienced, one which she characterizes as a physical depletion onset by chronic illness. In fact, in her autobiography titled Souvenirs (published in three volumes, 1835-1837) this “ailment” of hers is a recurrent theme: a certain unease and sensitivity to sound which compells the painter to constantly shift her place of lodging during her travels about Italy and Europe. She also suffers from a distinctly adverse affect to direct sunlight and intense, ambient colors, as well as the frigid Russian climate which instills in her the growing notion that soon she will no longer be able to paint at all. Elisabeth endures this chronic affliction as her own private malaise. As such, the woman described in Souvenirs dovetails with the one idealized in Elisabeth’s eternally youthful looking self-portraits.
Seemingly never sick, when nevertheless compromised Elisabeth’s health tends to mirror historical developments. Though worn down by personal failures, it’s largely the events of the French Revolution that end up draining her the most. To help her bounce back nothing appears more appealing than traveling, which on the one hand serves to assuage her state of mind while on the other overstimuilates her, thereby intensifying her hypersensitivty, i.e. her true “ailment”. How, then, to definitively cure such a malady ? The answer comes from the same naturalist Felice Fontana, from whom she learns that her weakness is actually her artistic strength, and that therefore the only remedy rests in abandoning painting altogether. Recalling the naturalist’s prescription from the pages of her Souvenirs, a smile comes to the face of an elderly Vigée Le Brun, acknowledgement on her part that her life and art had always been an irreconcilable union. Thus, Elisabeth purposely leaves us with a modern vision of herself, one whose “ailment” has served not to enfeeble but rather garner her stature amidst the protagonists of Europe’s newfound Romanticism.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
(Paris, 1755 – Paris 1842)
Daughter of the painter Louis Vigée, she marries the art dealer Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun, from whom she bears her daughter Julie. Thanks to her husband’s backing, her painting career quickly advances. In 1778, the unveiling of her portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette signals the beginning of perpetually positive reviews both from the French aristocracy and foreign elites. Under the Queen’s aegis, she is admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1783. The French Revolution forces Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun to flee Paris in what proves to be a lengthy exile, precipitating and coinciding with her personal “Grand Tour” across Italy and Europe as far as Russia, followed by other trips to London and Switzerland. Repatriated for good, with the help of her nephews she compiles the three volumes of her Souvenirs (Paris, 1835-1837), in which she pens the autobigraphy of a self-assured and self-aware artist working within the framework of European portrait painting.