LOUISE ÉLISABETH VIGÉE LE BRUN (PARIS 1755-1842) - Lot 58

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  3. LOUISE ÉLISABETH VIGÉE LE BRUN (PARIS 1755-1842) - Lot 58
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Lot n° 58
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Estimation :
40000 - 60000 EUR
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Result : 87 584EUR
LOUISE ÉLISABETH VIGÉE LE BRUN (PARIS 1755-1842) - Lot 58
LOUISE ÉLISABETH VIGÉE LE BRUN (PARIS 1755-1842) Bust-length portrait of a woman Oval canvas on its original stretcher (probably a transposition). Signed and dated lower right: "Mde Le Brun f / 1777" (signature and date incised in the material). 65.5 × 54.5 cm. (Restoration) Provenance : Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot (Maître Baudouin), May 29, 1914, no. 12, reproduced ("Portrait de femme", sold for 12,500 frs). Louise - Élisabeth Lebrun painted this portrait in the early years of Louis XVI's reign. By then, she had made a name for herself, and her diary records no fewer than seventy-four portraits delivered in 1776. Her first and only real master was her father, the portraitist Louis Vigée. When he died in 1768, it was Gabriel Doyen, a renowned painter and great friend of his, who encouraged Louise-Elisabeth to take up the brush again. By the age of fourteen, she was already painting portraits in oil and pastel. Her father having left her no fortune, it was through her art that she supported herself and her mother. Together, they visited Rubens and "many rooms full of paintings by the greatest masters" in Luxembourg, as well as the galleries of leading Parisian collectors. In the second letter of her Souvenirs, she writes: "I copied several heads of young girls by Greuze, because they explained to me the half-tones found in delicate complexions; Wandik also explained them, but more finely. I owe to this work the all-important study of the degradation of light on the protruding parts of a head, a degradation I admired so much in Raphaël's heads. My aptitude for painting was remarkable, and my progress was so rapid that people began to talk about me in the world, which earned me the satisfaction of knowing Joseph Vernet. He advised him: "Above all, do as much as you can from nature: nature is the first of all masters". The flower slipped into the bodice of this elegant woman is a perfect illustration of Madame Vigée-Lebrun's Souvenirs, as she strolls through the avenues of the Palais-Royal on a summer's day, just after leaving the Opéra. "It was fashionable - for women to wear very large bouquets, which, combined with the odoriferous powders with which everyone perfumed their hair, really scented the air we breathed (Letter II of the Souvenirs)". The present painting is signed "M[a]d[am]e Le Brun". In 1776, the year of her marriage, Élisabeth Vigée signed her maiden name followed by her married name. While she may have abandoned her maiden name in the decade that followed, she later reintroduced it in her signature. It was in 1778, shortly after painting this portrait, that she first painted Queen Marie-Antoinette in full court costume (canvas, 273 × 193 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). A certificate of inclusion in the catalog raisonné of paintings, pastels and drawings by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun by Joseph Baillio, dated June 2022, will be given to the buyer.
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