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Julie Le Brun was born on 12 February 1780 in Paris, France, to Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. When her parents separated in 1789, Julie traveled with her mother. Early in life she produced a number of pastels , including one after a piece by Jakob Orth; in her memoirs the elder painter refers to ses heureuses dispositions pour la peinture (her happy disposition ...
- Painter
- Jeanne-Julie-Louise Le Brun, 12 February 1780, Paris, France
- Dlle Nigris, Brunette (nickname)
- Louis Vigée (grandfather)
Julie, who had inherited her father’s debts, died nearly destitute in Paris in 1819. Vigée Le Brun’s many charming portraits of the young Julie suggest her strong affection for her daughter as a child, and their success and popularity in the public arena of the Salons are evidence of the esteemed place of childhood in Enlightenment society.
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The successive portraits of Vigée Le Brun’s daughter Julie (1780–1819) are milestones in the history of a passionate, conflicted mother-daughter relationship. In the present work, Julie is depicted as Flora, the goddess of flowers who gives birth to spring. She is exposed to the whims of Zephyr, the wind god who wed Flora and swept her away.
- Overview
- What is she wearing?
- Why would she dress this way for her self-portrait?
- Reading the clues of dress in a self-portrait
By Dr. Ingrid E. Mida
During the course of her lifetime, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted many self-portraits, including her 1789 Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie (à l’Antique). In this intimate painting, she is seated on a bench as her daughter Julie leans into her body, and the arms of mother and daughter circle around each other. What differentiates this work from other self-portraits is her choice of attire. In this work, she appears to be wearing a one-shouldered dress that resembles the ancient Greek chiton, a garment not worn since antiquity. Why would the artist dress this way?
While other self-portraits by Vigée Le Brun show her wearing fashionable but modest dress (see for example her self-portrait from 1790), this garment exposes one shoulder and the upper chest area of her body. Although Vigée Le Brun wrote in her memoirs that she often “wore white dresses in muslin or linen
,” [1] she is not wearing an actual dress in this self-portrait, but one that has been formed from a length of white cloth wrapped over one shoulder and around her body. The cloth is held in place with a red scarf that is bound twice around her torso and fastened underneath her bust. A length of green silk is draped across her legs and a red ribbon is tied around her unpowdered hair. The artist’s considerable skill in rendering cloth is evident but there is another message intended by her choice of dress in this work.
As a woman artist in eighteenth century France, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun had to work harder to gain access to the profession than a man with comparable skills, especially since women were not permitted access to life drawing classes. At the time, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) governed the profession of art in France, such that only members of the Academy had the right to publicly exhibit their work in the official salons. Although Vigée Le Brun was initially denied membership to the Academy, in 1783 the king of France ordered an exception be made and the artist became one of four female members.
An artist’s self-portrait is a form of calling card that not only demonstrates skills in achieving a likeness but may also be designed to convey messages about the artist’s identity and inner life. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s design of her 1789 self-portrait with her daughter echoes that of the Renaissance painter Raphael, a much-admired artist in eighteenth century France. Vigée Le Brun’s pose with her daughter creates a triangular composition that is reminiscent of Raphael’s Madonna and Child in The Small Cowper Madonna. In Raphael’s work, the arms of baby Jesus encircle his mother’s neck and the colours red, blue and green predominate. In addition, the manner in which the drapery falls across the lap in Le Brun’s work also seems to emulate Raphael.
Aside from the reference to Raphael, the draped cloth worn by Vigée Le Brun also creates a timeless quality that harkens back to the classical period. Although a more informal and lightweight type of long-sleeved dress was worn in the 1780s by women including the artist and her clients, the dress worn by the artist in this particular self-portrait is quite different from the the
. The garment worn by Vigée Le Brun in this work bares one shoulder and, in this way, closely resembles a chiton, a sleeveless and form-fitting dress created from draped cloth. Many examples of the chiton can be seen ancient Greek sculpture, including a marble statue of Aphrodite from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When an artist creates a self-portrait, they can choose to wear whatever they feel best reflects their identity. In reading such works, it is important to consider the fact that the artist’s choice of attire may or may not reflect what was actually worn at the time but instead be a deliberate reference to another artist and/or another time period. Such is the case in Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie (à l’Antique) in which she references the classical period in her manner of dress in order to cast herself as equal to legendary masters from the past.
Notes:
1.Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Memoirs of Madame Vigée-Lebrun, translated by Lionel Strachey, 1903 (London: Dodo Press, 2017), p. 42.
Additional resources:
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
See a portrait by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun of Marie Antoinette wearing a chemise á la reine at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Born in Brussels in 1981 from Dutch-Belgian-Norwegian parents, I was raised in Dutch and French and am fluent in both languages. I attended the European School in Brussels, where I also took evening classes in fashion design at the Saint Luc school, and with my baccalaureate in my pocket, I left for Paris.
Julie Lebrun Also known as Julie Lebrun primary name: Lebrun, Julie other name: Le Brun ...
