Homage Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun by Nop Briex

"Self-portrait in a Straw Hat" by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. A modern twist on a classic pictorial

In the 18th century, Madame Le Brun painted portraits of nobility, and with the support of Marie Antoinette, her career flourished. She painted more than 30 paintings of the queen and her family, but was forced to flee the country during the French Revolution.

After fleeing the French, she lived and worked in major European capitals. She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors and writers, and was elected to art academies in 10 cities.

Le Brun's artistic style was part of the aftermath of Rococo, while she also adopted a neoclassical style. Her colour palette was influenced by Rococo, but her style emanated from the emerging neoclassicism.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842) was a prominent French portrait painter of the late eighteenth century. Vigée Le Brun created a name for herself by serving as portrait painter to Marie Antoinette.

Many of her paintings are owned by major museums, including the Louvre, the Hermitage Museum, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and many other collections in continental Europe and the United States.

Vigée Le Brun left a legacy of some 660 portraits and 200 landscapes, and when she was in her eighties, she published her memoirs in three volumes called Souvenirs.

Born in Paris, she was the daughter of a portraitist and fan painter, Louis Vigée, from whom she received her first instructions. Her mother, Jeanne, was a hairdresser.

By the time she was an early teenager, Élisabeth was painting portraits professionally. In 1776, she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a painter and art dealer, and shortly afterwards she began painting portraits of many of the nobility.