Souvenirs: From a Memoir

A selection from the memoir of Elisabeth Louise Vige Le Brun, the renowned eighteenth-century French portraitist and one of the most important women painters in art history In her memoir, Elisabeth Louise Vige Le Brun offers a candid and thoroughly enjoyable account of her life and art. She relates her encounters among the royalty and aristocracy she paintedincluding, most famously, her patron Marie Antoinetteand the effusive reception they extended to her across Europe. Forced to flee during the French Revolution, Vige Le Brun traveled through Italy, Russia, Germany, and England, returning twelve years later to France under Napoleon I. These pages demonstrate her unflagging creativity during unstable times and her remarkable savvy. Her observations provide unique insight into the art world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a time when women were rarely allowed success. In her introduction to this volume, the scholar Anne Higonnet conveys Vige Le Bruns unique position at a turning point in the art world, as well as the larger world beyond, and navigates in particular how one retroactively reconstructs a relationship to a world-changing revolution.