MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN.*
THE lady who in her old age sat down to indite the two pleasant volumes now included in a cheap form in the Bibliotheque Char- pentier, was one of the most successful artiste, not to say success- ful women, the world ever saw. She lived a long life of more than eighty years, dying quite in our time, in 1842. She passed some fifty of these years in painting half the crowned heads in Europe, princes, generals, authors, and beautiful women. She was a member of the Academy of Paris, of St. Petersburg, of Berlin, of St. Luke of Rome, and of various smaller but art-loving cities. She made two fortunes, one of which her husband spent for her, by the other of which she provided comfortably for her old age ; M. le Brun and she having amicably retired from partner- ship. Her life reads like a fairy tale, all full of queens and princes and devoted slaves. Marie Antoinette picked up her brushes when, shortly before the birth of a child, Madame Le Brun had the misfortune to overthrow her box of materials at the royal feet. The Empress of all the Russias sat to her in all her jewels; the Prince Regent of England trotted in and out of her studio while she was in London, until his visits quite shook old Queen Charlotte's nerves. The Comte d'Artois wept with joy to see her in the land of exile. She painted all the good society of France before the Revolution, and during the Emigration ; and even took up her brushes after the Restoration, though she was then getting old. She painted Lord Byron and Lady Hamilton, and the Prince Regent and Miss Dillon, and ever so many more, English, Irish, and Americans ; six hundred portraits in all, did those indefatigable fingers trace, amidst all the disadvantages of a woman's life, plagued with a difficult husband, a disagreeable step- father, and a daughter who would marry according to her own liking and against her mother's wish. This marriage, and her daughter's death in the prime of life, were Madame Le Brun's great sorrows. But the active, serene old lady outlived them ; worked on valiantly as long as she could wield a brush ; and, retiring to the beautiful wooded heights of Louveciennes, near St. Germain's, died there in the reign of Louis Philippe, and is buried in the village churchyard.
To our generation, Madame Le Brun is chiefly known by her fine portraits in the Louvre. There are two, we believe, in the place of honour, the Salon Carre, and there are two more in the large gallery devoted exclusively to French art ; one of which latter is the portrait of herself and her daughter as a child, the little thing affectionately hugging her mother round the neck in a very natural attitude. This picture has been engraved again and again, and can easily be procured by those who wish for a speci- men of Madame Le Brun's talent. Two Angelica Kauffman are in the vicinity, and are very inferior in truth and power.
Madame Le Brun was the only daughter of Louis Vigee, a jolly, popular artist of Louis XV.'s reign. She was born in 1755, and a young brother three years later, whom she describes as being as beautiful as an angel, while she had an enormous forehead, sunken eyes, and a pale, thin face. Something of this physiog- nomy may be traced in her portrait, though she became a pass- ably pretty woman, with features full of intelligence and vivacity. When she was only thirteen years old she lost her father from a singular and painful cause. lie had swallowed a fish-bone, and not all the care of the then famous Surgeon Come, who made repeated incisions in search of the intruder, availed to save his life. The little girl, who had already begun to paint, and who inherited from him the power which was to make her famous, felt the loss cruelly, and for long would not touch her brushes, till Doyen, one of her father's artist friends, persuaded her to set to work again. She began working from nature, made several por- traits in pastel and oil, and drew in the evenings with Mdlle. Roquet, an artist a year older than herself, whose father kept a • Souraan de Madame rig& Le Brun. Parini Cluirpentier et Cie.
curiosity-shop. Mdlle. Roquet became a member of the Academy of St. Luke of Rome ; as for Louise Vigee, she painted so well that she began to be talked of in the artist world ; and Joseph Vernet patted her encouragingly and gave her excellent advice. Twenty years later she painted his portrait, which was exhibited at the Louvre.
Now began some very happy and successful years. Mdlle. Vigee became the mode in that bright intellectual society of pre-revolu- tionary Paris, so soon to be swept away. She had access to all the best private as well as public collections, and was an indefatigable copyist of Rembrandt, Vandyke, Rubens, and Greuze. Of Raphael she says, " I only truly learnt to know him in Italy." Orders for portraits flowed in upon her, and money with them. But the orphaned household rested upon her, and her brother's clothes and schooling also, and in an evil hour her mother remarried, apparently from pecuniary motives only, but of which the folly and sorrow were very soon visible, for M. Le Sevre took Louise's earnings, and kept the little family at the smallest possible cost ; to the violent indig- nation of Joseph Vernet, who tried to persuade her to pay her stepfather a fixed sum. But, says she, " I was afraid of my mother suffering for it." Still, as Louise cared very little for money, and very much for art, she got on very happily ; and became acquainted with various famous people. Madame Geoffrin came to see her, and the Duchesse de Chartres (the wife of Egalite) saw her painting at her window, as she herself was walking with her ladies on the terrace of the Palais Royal, and sent for the young artist, while all the great ladies of the Faubourg St. Germain followed suit, and petted her in royal company.
So time passed until Louise Vigee was twenty years old, and then a still more unfortunate idea seized her mother, that of marry- ing her to a certain M. Le Brun, who had a very fine gallery of pictures, and had the reputation of being rich. " Not that he was disagreeable," says she, candidly, but "I earned plenty of money, and did not feel any desire to marry." But affection for her mother and dislike of her stepfather appeared to have urged her on, though, as she was going to church, she confesses to having considered within her own mind, "Shall I say yes or no?" It was however, a yes that she uttered, and she became Madame Le Brun; and M. Le Brun, though not disagreeable, was anything but a good husband ; he ran after other women, and lost at play, and spent his and her money, and that so effectually that when she emigrated in 1789, she had nothing but the yearly earnings of her brush to count on for the support of herself and her daughter, though she says she had herself earned not less than. a million of francs, £40,000.
In the pre-revolutionary years Madame Le Brun saw much of Marie Antoinette, whom she painted many times ; and of whom she speaks with the tenderest reverence. There is a pretty anecdote of the Queen ordering a certain large family group to be turned with its face to the wall ; and then fearing Madame Le Brun's feelings might be hurt, sending expressly to say it was because the picture contained the portrait of her lost boy (the first Dauphin), and she could not bear to pass it daily.
Of a very different woman, Madame Du Barry, there are also some curious details. Madame Le Brun often went to see her in her retreat at Louveciennes. She was very good to the poor, it seems, but her conversation was anything but lively. Madame Le Brun painted her three times. She was with her in September, 1789 ; as the two ladies heard the distant cannonading, Madame Du Barry said, " If Louis XV. had lived, surely all this would not have happened." The poor woman had made a wiser remark if she had said that it would not have happened had Louis XV. never lived !
This was about the last tranquil hour of Madame Le Brun in France. In October, seeing everything upsetting around her, and the King and Queen brought to the Tuileries by main force, the curious practical sagacity which so eminently distinguished her character warned her to fly. She left several unfinished portraits, and refused to begin upon that of a beautiful girl of sixteen, who afterwards became Duchesse de Noailles. " Success or fortune were no longer in question ; one had only to consider saving one's head." So she said good-bye to M. Le Brun, and packed herself and her little daughter of five or six years old in the Lyons diligence as soon as she could get places, which was not till the close of a fortnight, as all the emigrants were flying by the diligence in like manner. She took nothing with her but her clothes and eighty Ionia for the journey ; which was lucky, as she says her opposite neighbour was a very dirty man, who told her he had stolen several watches. Her jewels, her small funds, all remained in her husband's hands, and so far was he from ever I sending her any money, that he wrote her the most lamentable
letters about his poverty, and she twice sent him relief. His goose with the golden eggs had taken flight. '
Madame Le Brun travelled from Lyons to Turin, and thence to Rome. In every town she passed through she was feted and taken to see all the galleries. At Parma she was presented to Marie ea.ntoicette's sister ; at Bologna they made her a member of the Academy ; at Florence she ran about from palace to palace iu a state of enchantment. " Could I but have ceased to think of that poor France, I should have been the happiest of women."
To Rome and Naples we cannot follow her from want of space ; nor to St. Petersburg, where she saw the last days of Catherine II., which she describes very graphically. In 1801 she returned to Paris ; but though affectionately received in public and private (M. Le Brun bought a quantity of beautiful new furniture, which she probably paid for), she was so wretched at the changes she found there, and at the absence or violent deaths of all her old gay circle of intimates, that she could not bear it, and having long had a desire to visit London, she set off again in 1802. Her remarks on English society are amusing ; and there are little notices of Mrs. Siddons, the Duchess of Devonshire, and the Prince of Wales's wig, which was exceedingly becoming, the hair beiug arranged like that of the Apollo Belvidere. But, alas! he was about forty years old, and had already become too fat. She speaks with pleasure of a visit to Herschel and his sister, " worthy each of the other by their learning and their noble simplicity." She was now fifty years of age, having remained in England nearly three years. But neither her talent nor her energy were yet upon the wane. Enough has, however, been said to show what manner of woman she was, and she may be quoted efficiently by all who are fighting the battle of education and a wider career for her sex. She deserves to be better known in England than she is. Engravings of some of her 600 portraits must doubtless be in the Print Room of the British Museum ; and several of her pictures must exist in our private galleries, as she gives a list of twenty-five portraits painted while among us.
She sleeps in her grave in the cemetery of beautiful Louvecionnes, where once she listened with Madame Du Barry to the Revolutionary cannonade ; and the English traveller who cares to pay it a visit will not regret his day spent in one of the most picturesque en- virons of Paris, and one which is hardly known to our country- men who frequent the gay city, though it is but two miles from St. Germain's and four from Versailles.
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