Souvenirs: From a Memoir

A selection from the memoir of Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, the renowned eighteenth-century French portraitist and one of the most important women painters in art history In her memoir, Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun offers a candid and thoroughly enjoyable account of her life and art. She relates her encounters among the royalty and aristocracy she painted--including, most famously, her patron Marie Antoinette--and the effusive reception they extended to her across Europe. Forced to flee during the French Revolution, Vigee Le Brun traveled through Italy, Russia, Germany, and England, returning twelve years later to France under Napoleon I. These pages demonstrate her unflagging creativity during unstable times and her remarkable savvy. Her observations provide unique insight into the art world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a time when women were rarely allowed success. In her introduction to this volume, the scholar Anne Higonnet conveys Vigee Le Brun''s unique position at a turning point in the art world, as well as the larger world beyond, and navigates in particular how one retroactively reconstructs a relationship to a world-changing revolution.

Product details

• Authors: Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun
• Assisted by: Higonnet Anne (Introduction)
• Publisher: Zwirner David Books
• Content: Book
• Product form: Paperback / Softback
• Publication date: 08.05.2025
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business; Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries
• EAN: 9781644231623
• ISBN: 978-1-64423-162-3
• Pages: 184
• Series: Ekphrasis
• Subjects: Theory of art, Memoirs, ART / Individual Artists / Essays, Marie Antoinette, women artists, Feminist Art, Individual artists, art monographs, French Revolution, Paintings and painting, women painters, artist memoir, Vigée Le Brun, french revolution art