Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Marie Antionette’s Portrait Artist

Muslin is a really plain, delicate cotton fabric, and heaven forbid that the Queen be comfortable, she was not even wearing a corset. In the second, more socially acceptable version, Antionette was wearing a corset and a glamorous blue gown and her hair was appropriately coiffed and topped with a fancy head piece. Over her time working as a portrait artist for the palace, she painted more than 30 portraits of the Queen. She became very fond of Marie Antionette and snug her praises of being a kind and generous woman who instilled good manners and values in her own children. Another of her famous portraits, which many dubbed as propaganda, was of the Queen with her children. There was an empty cradle also in the painting, as Marie’s youngest infant child had just died. This was meant to endear the public to the Queen showing her as a loving mother who experienced tragedy. The Queen was apparently unable to look at the painting without reliving the grief of a lost child and ordered it removed from the halls of Versailles. This ended up preserving the painting from the violence of the March on Versailles where peasants stormed the palace and broke into the Queens bedroom plunging knives into her bed. Don’t worry she wasn’t in it at the time. However, she did later lose her head to the guillotine, which distressed out artist Elisabeth who had left the country by that stage.

Our artistic party loving portrait painter, was very distressed by the violent and chaotic events of the French Revolution. She lost many of her previous clients and friends to the relentless blade of the guillotine. She was so afraid, that she left Paris and lived in various parts of Europe for many years. She also got a divorce from her husband and so she was able to support herself and her daughter with her earnings from then on. In her diary she tells of how she would hear shooting in the background as she was painting portraits and how revolutionaries threw sulphur into her cellar. She also relates a story of how one of her acquaintances, although spared from the guillotine was force to drink a glass of the blood that was flowing in the stream that was in front of the prison he was being held, regardless he ended up going to the guillotine a few years later. As she was escaping the country she was almost stopped by a drunk and angry mob and her friend advised her to take a public coach rather than her personal carriage and so she was able to leave.

But let’s not just take her word for the extent of the violence in Paris in this period. Let’s see what some corroborating witnesses have to say. Warning, it is just about to get icky, so skip this section if you are squeamish. A former deputy of the National Convention describes the horrors he saw, “Neither age nor sex were spared. Women, children and old men were ruthlessly hacked to pieces in the name of humanity,” “They threw blazing sulphur in through the ventilators…They killed, they slaughtered, they sated themselves on murder. Bodies already pierced a thousand times were slashed and mutilated, their brains dashed out against the walls.”

The English political thinker from the time explains, “they were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow citizens, and bathing in tears and plunging in poverty and distress thousands of worthy men and worthy families… [The revolutionary government were] authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings throughout their harassed land”.

A 2016 historian blames the revolutionary journalist Marat, who “had deliberately whipped up a campaign of bloodlust and frenzied hatred” and that the “massacres left a stain on the Revolution that could not be wiped out.”

Elisabeth did eventually come back to Paris after the Revolution and during Napoleon’s reign, and during her lifetime she is said to have produced more than 800 works of art. And she lived to the ripe old age of 86.