Elisabeth Louise Vige Le Brun - Research Paper Example

A wealthy heir Louise Marie Adelaide de Bourbon later patronized Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun. During this period, she received advices from Joseph Verne, Jean-Baptist Greuze, Gabriel Francois, and other masters of time (May 3). She also taught herself to paint through copying established paintings of peter Paul Rubens. Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun adopted a technique of painting layers of brilliant color on panels of wood to achieve polished, animated, and immensely attractive portraits of aristocracy and European royalty.

She mastered a neo-classical art, an unemotional and severe and form of art harkening back to the grandeur of Rome and Ancient Greece. Its rigidity was a reaction to the emotional charged Baroque style and the over bred Rococo style. Her style is generally considered Rococo and shows interest in neoclassical painting subject. In her early, teenage Louise Elisabeth was painting professional portraits. She applied to the Academia de Saint Luc, after her studio was seized for operating it without a license.

The academie immensely exhibited her work in their salon. Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun was made a member of the academie in 25 October 1783. She got married on 7 August 1775 to Jean-Baptist-Pierre who was an art dealer and a painter (Dunn 4). Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun painted portraits of many of nobilities of the day as her career blossomed. She was invited to paint Marie Antoinette at the palace of Versailles. The queen was so much impressed that Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun painted her portrait together with her family for more than thirty times within a period of six years.

She was viewed as the official portraitist of Marie Antoinette hence immense friendship grew between them (Bietoletti 76). Louise Le Brun had an unerring instinct of costume, a flair for innovative poses, and the ability to capture a likeness with relative ease. Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun gave birth to a doughter Jeanne Julie Louise on 12 February 1780 whom she called “Julie”. In 1781, she toured Netherlands and Flanders together with her husband. The works of the Flemish masters inspired her to try new techniques of painting.

With the new techniques, she painted portraits of the nobility including the one f the prince of Nassau (Fredrickson and Webb 51). Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun was accepted in France’s Academie Royale de Peinture ET de Sculpture as a member on 31 May 1783. She painted numerous portraits with allegorical history painting that she considered her peace bringing back the prosperity. The academy refused to place her work in the academic category of a type -either history or portraiture. She was denied admission in to the academy because her husband was an art dealer.

Eventually, she was admitted into the academy through Louis xvi order after a considerable pressure by his wife Marie Antoinette in favor of her portraitist (Bietoletti 77). Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun caused a public minor scandal with her own portrait in which she was seen smiling open-mouthed in contravention of conventions going back to antiquity. In 1789, she was succedent to Marie Antoinette as a court painter by Alexander Kucharsky. During the French Revolution, the royal family was arrested.

Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun fled France with her daughter Julie. For some years, she lived and worked in Austria, Russia, and Italy where her experience of dealing an aristocratic clientele was