April 16, 2022 • 31 mins
This 2016 episode covers the first woman to ever become a court painter in France. She painted royalty and nobility throughout Europe, including Marie Antoinette, even as her personal life had its ups and downs.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. It is Elizabeth Louise's birthday. So today's
Saturday Classic is our episode on her, which we just
missed having ready in time for her birthday when we
originally released it. She was born in April sixte and
this episode originally came out a month after her birthday.
On MA got a couple of points in this episode.
(00:25):
We mostly me mentioned getting images of our artwork to
use on our website, and if you have not been
to our website in a few years, we no longer
have episode specific artwork on there, but there's still just
a ton of her work available to look at online.
It is a quick Google image search away, so we
hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History
(00:50):
Class A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and well
come to the podcast. I'll try and I'm trade v Wilson.
And it hasn't actually happened as of when we are recording,
but by the time this episode comes out, we will
have recently passed the birthday of a very important French
(01:11):
artist and we do not have an episode on her.
This is what happens when we have to record like
an extra three week buffer of episodes ahead of time. Yeah,
time travel, time travel, which is fine. I kind of
wish I had thought to do it sooner in the
year so we could land this nearer her birthday, but
we didn't, uh. And A large part of her appeal
as a portrait artist was her ability to paint incredibly
(01:34):
flattering likenesses. She brought a lightness to her depictions that
gives them great life, and she actually made a good
living with her art. Although she always had aspirations of
working on sort of grand historical art, she was kept very,
very busy by a steady list of commissions, starting when
she was merely a teenager and lasting throughout her life.
Her works, which captured the likenesses of many royals and
(01:57):
nobles of her time, are seen literally throughout the world.
So if you google Marie Antoinette, you will undoubtedly see
several portraits painted by the subject of today's podcast, Elizabeth
Louise Holly is going to say that more beautifully than
me consistently throughout this entire episode. No, I'm sure I'm
clunking it up in my own magical way. So. Elizabeth
(02:20):
Louise Vijay was born in Paris on April sixteenth, seventeen
fifty five. Her father, Louis vj was a successful artist
who specialized in pastel portraits. Because of her father's work,
the Vijay family was afforded some access to intellectual circles
and society that otherwise would have been a little closed
off to them. As a consequence, even as a child,
(02:41):
Elizabeth received lessons and encouragement in her artistic pursuits by
some of the most popular artists of the day. Yeah,
she really was clearly going to be an artist no
matter what. She went to boarding school from the ages
of six to eleven, and, as I said, an artist
from the beginning. She spent most of her time, they're
drawing on just about every scrap of paper she came across.
(03:04):
She basically couldn't stop making art. She told one story
in her memoirs where she was sent outside and she
would draw in the sand and the dirt, portraits and
and little sketches while she was just standing there in
the yard, because she would rather be painting or drawing
than doing anything else. Because she was also a little
bit of a frail child, her parents would often take
(03:25):
her out of school for a few days at a time,
so she could go home and kind of recover, And
she apparently loved this because she absolutely adored her family.
She loved spending time with them, particularly her father, and
she also adored her younger brother, Etienne, who was born
three years after her. Once she was permanently removed from
boarding school, she was quite happy. But her bliss was
(03:46):
pretty short lived. Just a year later, her father became
seriously ill and he never recovered. He died when Elizabeth
was just twelve, and his last words to Elizabeth and
Etienne were be happy my children in and the way
her memoirs written, those might have been his last words period,
but it's not entirely clear, uh, which is so sad
(04:08):
and poignant, heartbreaking, And the death of her father was,
as you can imagine, really intense once she was very
young too. He had kind of been the center of
her universe, uh, and it really halted her interest in
art for a little while. She describes herself as being
unable to pick up her her pastels for a while.
(04:30):
But eventually the French painter Gabrielle Francois Doyen, who had
been a good friend of Louis vig urged Elizabeth to
return to her passion of drawing and painting as a
way of coping with her grief, and this is really
when she started working in earnest on portraiture. She also
started visiting galleries and museum exhibits with her mother, and
(04:50):
she became more fully immersed in studying the masters of painting.
She copied their styles and various portraits and studies. While
Louis had left no financial Christian for the family when
he died, she was able to make a little money
with her portrait work. But the money that was coming
in really wasn't enough to support Elizabeth, her mother, and
her brother, and so her mother remarried to a jeweler.
(05:13):
But the young woman Elizabeth continued to take portrait clients,
and by the age of fifteen, she had set up
a studio and began painting portraits basically as her profession,
and she quickly grew a considerable clientele. But the money
that she was making at this point went right to
her stepfather, a man who she pretty frankly detested. Her
clientele continued to grow, a fact that Elizabeth attributed not
(05:38):
only to her skill as a painter, but also her
own good looks. We have self portraits of her as
the artwork on our website for these episodes, and I
feel like I can see her kind of saying in
my mind, yes, I am quite pretty, not in an
arrogant way. She has a matter of fact, she's pretty
(05:59):
frank about it her memoirs, and she does sort of paint.
It's like, I'm not trying to brag, but people would
stare at me in public, like I was pretty because
my mother was pretty. Yes, so she would later write, quote,
since I have acknowledged that I was stared at in
the streets, the same is true of the theaters and
other public places, and that I was the object of
(06:20):
many attentions, that maybe it may readily be guessed that
some admirers of my face gave me commissions to paint theirs.
They hoped to get into my good graces this way.
And I kind of like though that she, while she
was very clear throughout her life that her art was
her passion, she almost tries to downplay her own skill
(06:40):
by going, oh, some of them just wanted to work
with me because I was pretty. Just kind of a
weird um yeah, like boast slash humbleness. At the same time,
I'm not. I'm really not sure what it is exactly
about her portraits that makes me feel like she's going, yes,
I am quite pretty. She was quite pretty. She also, though,
had this very funny way of diverting the attentions of
(07:02):
young men who had hired her, in her opinion, to
paint their portraits just so they could be with her. Uh.
And so she would pose them in such a way
that they would always have to be looking away from her,
And whenever she would catch them trying to move their
their eyes and gaze at her while she painted, she
would then say, I'm doing the eyes now, so that
they would have to return to the original position and
(07:22):
couldn't look at her. Uh. And she always had her
mother present when she was painting clients, and this amused
her mother as well. She was made a member of
the Painters Guild of the Academy de Saint Luke when
she was just nineteen, which significantly expanded her professional network
and brought in new clients. Uh. That same year, seventeen
seventy four, Elizabeth met Jean Baptiste Pierre Raboin, who was
(07:45):
an art dealer as well as an artist, and they
were neighbors and Elizabeth was eager to visit his home
to see his vast collections of art, and while Elizabeth
Vija was not thinking about marriage, she was making her
own money. At this point, she really didn't see any
to worry about getting married and finding a husband to
support her. Her mother really encouraged her towards Lebron romantically,
(08:06):
hoping to ensure a secure future for her daughter. They
got married two years later. Initially, they didn't announce their
marriage because Monsieur Lebrun was skipping out on an engagement
to the daughter of a Dutch client. During the time
their marriage was secret, Elizabeth received numerous warnings from friends
and clients that this man would not make a good husband.
(08:28):
He's bits of advice and dried up once the couple
went public. Four years into their marriage, they had a daughter,
Jean Julie Louise, and Elizabeth adored her baby girl. Yeah.
Can you imagine being married to someone on the down
low and having people come and go, hey, look, I
know you've been kind of serious with this guy. You
should not marry him. Yeah, he's kind of a jerk. Uh.
(08:49):
He was not a great husband. Um aside from being
a cheater and a frequent patron of prostitutes. He, like
Elizabeth's stepfather, took all of her earnings from her art,
and then he gambled all of that away. But Elizabeth
generally described him fairly kindly in her writing, despite his faults.
(09:10):
She wrote, quote, his character exhibited a mixture of gentleness
and liveliness. He was extremely obliging to everybody, and in
a word, quite an agreeable person. But his furious passion
for gambling was at the bottom of the ruin of
his fortune and my own, of which she had the
entire disposal. But while Jean Baptiste was not an ideal
(09:32):
as a spouse, his art collection was another matter. She
studied the many paintings and prints that he amassed with
great fervor. She really loved it, and in seventy two
the couple traveled to lepai Ba the Low Countries. So
a quick geography aside, just in case you do not
know uh that designation. The Low Countries is the name
(09:52):
given to the coastal region of northwestern Europe that includes Luxembourg,
the Netherlands, and Belgium. While traveling in the Low Country,
Elizabeth studied another Landish art, the glaze working color palette
of Rubens was especially impactful, and it shaped the young
woman's arn't going forward from that point, and we're about
(10:12):
to get to the moment in her life that really
launched career into the stratosphere. But before we do that,
we're going to pause for a word from one of
our sponsors, which she was only twenty three. J Lebrun
(10:37):
was commissioned for an incredibly prestigious task. She was to
paint the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. She described the
Queen at the time as incredibly lovely. Quote. Marie Antoinette
was tall and admirably built, being somewhat stout, but not
excessively so. Her arms were superb, her hands small and
perfectly formed, and her feet charming. She had the best
walk of any woman in France, carrying her head erect
(10:59):
with dignity that stamped her queen in the midst of
her whole court. Her majestic man, however, not the least
diminishing with sweetness and amiability of her face. To anyone
who has not seen the Queen, it is difficult to
get an idea of all the graces and all the
nobility combined in her person. And while Leo was initially
(11:20):
afraid of the queen, as I can't imagine anyone wouldn't
be kind of nervous doing a portrait for a royalty.
Marie Antoinette was apparently very gracious with the painter and
the two really became quite friendly. Eventually the pair would
sing together while the painter worked once she had heard
that Elizabeth was had a fairly good singing voice. They
(11:42):
liked to sing together while she sat for portraits, which
I find so charming. Uh. And Elizabeth's time and Versailles
working on that first portrait of Louis the sixteenth wife
really led to great success for the young artist. She
became a court artist and was well paid for the position.
She was the first woman to ever become an artist
to the king, so it was quite significant. And over
the course of the ten years from seventeen seventy nine
(12:04):
to seventeen eighty nine, Leboin painted thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette.
You've probably seen many of them. I would say. One
of the most famous ones that immediately comes to mind
when I imagine portraits of Marie Antoinette is one of hers. Yeah,
I mean several. If you'd like go through your head
and go, oh, there's that other portrait of Oh yeah,
(12:25):
and there's they're probably most of them are the ones
that Leboin painted. They're beautiful. Louis the sixteenth was also
a fan of all these portraits, and he once told
the painter quote, I know nothing about painting, but you
make me like it. I think that's so sweet. I mean,
he was a mess in many ways, but I find
that quote terribly charming. Becoming one of the queen's favorites
(12:47):
definitely had some benefits. In seventeen eighty three, it was
Marie Antoinette's influence that finally got the Academy Royal Pol
to accept Via Lebois as a member. This professional artist
organization of incredible prestige rarely accepted women, and Va Lebron
had been trying for years to get in, but her
husband's work as an art dealer had been a little
(13:09):
bit of a roadblock. It was kind of a sticking
point that maybe this was more of a business thing
than an art thing. And she was actually only one
of four women in the organization when she was admitted,
and she was and the fact that she was there
was it came with a little bit of a level
of resentment on the part of the organization. Basically, they
did not appreciate that they had been pressured by the
monarchy to accept Via Lebroin. But if you know anything
(13:33):
about Marie Antoinette, you know that anyone and everyone associated
with her eventually became mired in rumors and accusations as
a queen's tendency to attract scandal really radiated to all
of her friends. There was gossip that vj Lebron was
not actually an artist, but instead that her work was
done by a ghost painter, and that she had used
(13:55):
sexual prowess to raise her position in court. Throughout all
of this, the Vija Lebron painted. She created portraits of
many of the more famous figures of the Louis the
sixteenth court, including Madame du Berri and the Duchess de Polignac.
She had as many as three sittings per day on
her schedule, and she worked furiously to keep up with
(14:16):
the demand for her work. She really had an incredible
work ethic. She worked so hard that she actually became ill.
For a time, her digestion suffered. It became quite poor.
She was unable to eat, and she lost a great
deal of weight. The remedy, according to her doctor, was
to go to bed immediately after eating dinner, and that
sounds counter to a lot of modern advice. Most people
will say, don't go lie down with a heavy meal
(14:38):
on your stomach, but the painter really credited this habit
was saving her life, as she she really did regain
strength and put some weight back on following uh these
doctors orders. Vija Lebron was in many ways the toast
of the town at this sphase of her career. People
came to visit her at her at her home studio often,
although she believed some of them were also there to
see her husband's art collection, and she often hosted readings
(15:01):
by poets and impromptu opera performances. Despite being a favorite
of the Queen and part of a very vibrant French
social scene, vi Lebrun was not a slave to fashion.
She didn't really like the fashion of the day. She
found it fussy and sort of ridiculous in many ways,
and she often tried to persuade her subjects to abandon
their trendy clothing for simpler and more classical drapings when
(15:25):
she was painting them. If you look at a lot
of these portraits that she did, she does have them
kind of draped and just very simple robes, shawls, etcetera.
She had to have dresses specially made to go to
Versailles for her sittings with Marie Antoinette. She didn't just
have fancy clothes on hand. Uh. And she always did
her own hair, which I thought was sort of charming
(15:47):
as well. She also hated the powdered look of hair.
She constantly begged her clients to please sit with their
natural hair color and not powder their hair. As the
French Revolution heated up and sentiment again the royal court
really started to grow. Len eventually fled France for her
own safely safety things. It got to the point where
(16:08):
her home was targeted. People would shake their fists at
her when she left the house, and someone had thrown
sulfur into the cellar, which sounds awful. Yeah, I also wonder,
and I don't know, Uh, this is purely speculation, but
I wonder if that could potentially have damaged any paintings
like just the You know, if you think of an
(16:30):
oil painting, they take a long time to cure, and
I imagine having weird things in the air might do
some damage to some of it, but I don't know.
That's again just speculation on my part, a question mark
if anybody knows, right us and tell us. For a
long while, though, resisted her urge to leave France because
she didn't want to break the large number of commissions
that she had in her queue. She really worked constantly.
(16:53):
She always had people on basically a wait list just
waiting to be the to have an availability. But in
the fall of eight and she was so shaken by
some of the violent ends that many of her society
acquaintances were meeting that she had in fact decided to leave,
and so she packed her carriage and prepared her exit.
But the night before she was planning to go, several
(17:13):
armed men broke into her room, and they appeared to
be inebriated, and they harassed her for a while, but
they did eventually leave. Later, two of them came back
and told her that they were neighbors and meant her
no harm, but that she simply had to go. They
further advised her not to take her own carriage but
instead to take a stage coach. She took their advice
(17:34):
and a week later left on the first stage coach
she had been able to book, and so she was
moving and with her young daughter to Italy, and when
she did so, her French citizenship was revoked. She estimated
that in her career up to that point she had
earned more than a million francs, but thanks to her
husband's gambling, she had almost nothing to her name when
she fled. Returning to France was impossible for twelve years,
(17:58):
and during that time she traveled to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany,
and eventually Russia, which she really loved and she stayed
there for six years. Coming up, we'll get into a
bit of detail about some unfortunate events in St. Petersburg, Russia,
as well as the painters later life, But first we're
going to pause for a very word from a sponsor.
(18:28):
So during all of these travels, when she was outside
of France, Vi Lebois was painting portraits to earn a
living to support herself and her daughter. But this was
definitely not a case of an artist scraping by and
doing work for pittances. Elizabeth's reputation as an artist was
really impressive. She was basically welcomed into all of the
houses of rulers and dignitaries throughout any of the areas
(18:51):
she traveled in. They were all more than happy to
pay the gifted painter to create beautiful portraits of themselves
and their families. She lived quite well while he was
in exile. During her time away from France, Elizabeth and
her husband severed their ties. In seventeen ninety three, Jean
Baptiste Pierre Le divorced his wife under duress from revolutionary
(19:13):
authorities who labeled Elizabeth as a deserter for having fled
the country. And in addition to the portraits which were
her bread and butter, uh I just wanted to mention
that while she was traveling, she did hundreds, literally hundreds
of landscaped pieces during her travel, somewhere in oils and
somewhere in Pastel's and those are things that didn't always
(19:34):
get a lot of attention from the art world, but
they're getting a little bit more, uh interest now. While
she loved St. Petersburg, particularly her relationship with her daughter
suffered there. Jean Julie Louise had grown into a lovely girl, and,
like her mother before her, received a great deal of
attention from potential suitors. When Julie as she was called,
(19:55):
was seventeen. She fell in love with a man about
a dozen years older because they was Degree and he
was secretary to account and when visual Lebron got wind
of this budding romance, she was first of all heartbroken
at the thought of losing her daughter. We spoke when
we mentioned her baby girl being born that she was
really devoted to her, and that stayed the case throughout
(20:16):
her life. She was so devoted to her child. Uh.
But then she started to ask around to get information
and opinions on Degree, but the things that she was
hearing were something of a mixed bag. Some people really
loved him and others had really little good to say
about him. But more concerning to the mother was really
the fact it almost is a repeat of how she
(20:37):
got into her marriage with Lebron, uh, is that she
was concerned that Negree was not really well positioned. He
had an okay job, but he really didn't have like
a great job, and Elizabeth advised her daughter against marriage,
and it eventually drove a huge wedge between mother and daughter.
(20:58):
The couple married, and while Vija Lebrown fulfilled the duties
of the bride's family, including giving the couple a sum
of money from her recent commissions. She was not a
happy mother of the bride. When mother visited her newly
wet daughter in the weeks following the wedding, it appeared
that Julie wasn't especially happy either, although she was resigned
to stay and just as Visa, Lebron was coping with
(21:21):
the heartbreak of seeing her only child in what appeared
to be an unhappy marriage. Uh the artist's mother died,
and the combined stresses and unhappiness of these events really
took their toll, and in an effort to escape via
change of scenery, Lebron decided to head to Moscow in
eighteen o one, as Russia was itself in the midst
(21:42):
of political turmoil related to the French Revolution and shifting
loyalties via Lebron was once again ill. She continued to
suffer both physically and mentally, and then decided to leave
Russia and le Bron returned to Paris after making several
visits throughout cities in Europe. She kind of took a long,
circuitous route home and she was greeted by happy friends
(22:03):
and family who were overjoyed to see her once again.
Once She did reach Paris, but she really didn't feel
at home in the changed city in general. She wrote,
Paris has a less lively appearance to me. And seeing
the words liberty, fraternity, or death that were scrawled on
the walls around the city which had been part of
the revolution, really saddened her, and it reminded her of
(22:23):
what she what her life had once been, and what
she had lost because of her melancholy at being in
the city she had once loved so much. The Brown
moved to London in eighteen o two. She wasn't entirely
enamored with England either. She's found it rather drab and uninspiring,
and the damp climate meant that her paintings took a
(22:44):
really long time to dry. She didn't find the art
community entirely welcoming either, and some of them even printed
criticisms of the French school of art and all who
came from it. Yeah, she got kind of embroiled in
a back and forth with another artist who printed some
nasty things quite clearly aimed at her uh and she
wrote him a letter in defense of of the French
(23:06):
artists that circulated among society. Like everyone knew about this letter,
so it was good, not the best welcome in terms
of that, although she did have friends there. But shortly
after visual leb arrived in London, the treat of the
Treaty of Amiens was signed, and as part of that treaty,
any French person in England who had been there less
than a year was to be sent out of the country.
(23:29):
But because Elizabeth did move in illustrious circles, the Prince
of Wales was able to secure a special permission from
King George the Third that enabled her to stay. She
remained in England for almost three years, visiting all of
the royal residences and castles. You could possibly imagine. Her
memoir just sort of lists them one after the other.
It's like, and then I went to this place, and
here's what I thought of the gardens and their art collection.
(23:51):
And it's like a long travel log of all the
places she visited. But she did move back to Paris
in eighteen o five. She had really just gotten settled
into a life she quite enjoyed in England, with a
well cultivated social circle and plenty of enjoyable invitations just
about anywhere she might want to go. But she had
gotten word that her daughter had returned to Paris, and
(24:12):
she hurried to see her. Julie and her husband had
traveled to France on business, but when that business concluded,
Nigre returned to St. Petersburg. Julie did not, and in
her memoirs, Elizabeth is not the least bit subtle about
happy how happy the couple split made her. From eighteen
o five on, Elizabeth lived in France for the rest
(24:32):
of her life. She spent the time between Paris and
the country is She really loved being in the country.
It was very inspiring to her um. But then over
the course of seven years, there was a great deal
of heartbreak in vig Lebron's life. First, in eighteen thirteen,
her former husband Jean Baptiste died, and while they had
been divorced for some time, the death really did affect
(24:54):
her deeply, and she grieved for him. Six years later,
in eighteen nineteen, Jean Jowe Louise became ill and her
health rapidly deteriorated. When she died, Elizabeth was devastated, but
just one year later, Elizabeth's brother Etienne, also died. To
cope with her grief, be Lebron traveled to Bordeaux, a
(25:15):
town she wasn't really familiar with. The complete shift of
mindset from exclusively mourning to also discovering a new place
seems to have really helped the painter get through this
difficult time, and she reported that her health improved on
the journey, also that her spirit was quote less dark
when she returned to Paris, and from that point on
her brother's two daughters, her nieces Madame de Riviere and
(25:38):
Eugenia lebro became her dearest relatives and closest friends. In
eighteen thirty five, urged on by her friend Princess Helene
Delgaruki of Russia, via Lebrium, published the first volume of
her three volume memoir titled Souvenir Dema VI. The next
two volumes were published during the following two years, and
in the opening of that memoir, when to describing her
(26:00):
natural proclivity toward art, Lebron wrote a passage that really
beautifully encapsulated her whole life. She wrote, quote I mentioned
these facts to show what an inborn passion for the
art I possessed. Nor has that passion ever diminished. It
seems to me that it has even gone on growing
with time. For today. I feel under the spell of
it as much as ever, and shall I hope until
(26:23):
the hour of death. Lebrun died in Paris on March
forty two, at the age of eight six. And she
did really paint right up until the end of her life. Uh.
In October of last year, the first monographic exhibition of
visions Lebroin's work to be mounted in her home country
(26:44):
went on display at the Grand Palais in Paris, France.
That was also somewhere that she had visited as a child.
And that exhibit is now on tour, so if you
are lucky, you might be in a place where you
can see it. It is currently at the met in
New York until mid May. I actually posted one of
the portraits that she did a Marie Intoinette and her children.
It's the one people sometimes wonder about the empty baby bassinet,
(27:06):
and it's because they had lost their fourth child, so
that is depicted empty because the child is gone. UH.
That will be, as I said, in New York until May,
and then it moves to the National Gallery of Canada
in Ottawa in June. UH. And you can also check
out I think we have a we'll have a link
to um the either the METS page or another one
(27:27):
that will show the the travel schedule. I'm not sure
where it goes from there, but it's spectacular. I really
She's one of those artists that I have often admired
throughout the years, even before I realized, like all of
these portraits that I was in love with were all her. Yeah,
it was not a name that I immediately recognized, just
because on paper, to me, it looks like French soup.
(27:52):
So when I this morning before we recorded, I was
tracking down all the artwork that we would use when
we put us on our website, and I had just
plunged hern Aim into one of the stock image sources
that we use, and the only thing that it returned
was this portrait of Marie Antoinette. And I had this
moment where I was like, but that's Marie Antoinette, And
then oh, right now I completely recognized, like all this
(28:14):
woman's portraits because I've seen a lot of them and
they have a very uh there's a look about them
that you can recognize after you look at them for
a while. Yeah, Like I mentioned at the top, there's
a lightness to them, the way she used light in
her portraits was very lovely, and she really none of
her portraits ever have a heavy feel like, even when
(28:36):
she's using darker tones, they all just have sort of
a feeling of brightness and uh, just lightness, even the
sad ones. Incidentally, that that portrait that I had just
mentioned of Marie Antoinette with her children, which was kind
of commissioned by the king in an effort to portray
his wife, you know, as a loving mother in the
(28:57):
hopes of kind of fixing a little bit of her
image at the time time, is one that La mentions
in her memoirs that the revolution or Marie Antoinette's grief
over the loss of that baby really saved that piece
of art from the revolution because it was in the
hall and Marie Antoinette would have to walk by it
(29:17):
on her way, I believe, to her dressing room, and
she finally was like, I can't look at this painting anymore.
It makes me sad every time I see it, and
it's too upsetting, and so they took it down, and
that's why it was not one of the things that
was damaged when the palace was ransacked. So sort of
grief sort of saved that portrait for us, So we're
lucky in that regard. But yeah, I just her memoirs.
(29:39):
I highly recommend. They're a pretty fun read. They're very lighthearted.
It's kind of interesting because she had this marriage that
wasn't great. You know, she had had a stepfather she
was not very fond of. Even when she's talking about
these deaths that really impacted her, she kind of whips
by them pretty quickly. She keeps it very light and
a lot of her memoirs are about the fabulous parties
she went to and fabulous people she met, and sort
(30:02):
of she was really into the social scene. And to me,
it's an interesting juxtaposition because someone that writes so much
like that, you wouldn't expect to be a completely devoted workhorse.
But she was basically like working her tail off all
day long to do all of these sittings and paint
portraits and keep up with her client list, and then
at night she was going to fabulous parties. And it
was just like this terrific life that she had put
(30:23):
together for herself that she really seemed to love. Like
she was like, I designed this life, I'm living it,
and I love it, and it's very admirable, and she
kind of doesn't even um tend to focus very much
on the fact that she was kind of breaking a
lot of glass ceilings for women artists at the time.
She's just like, oh, yeah, you know, I was cute,
so some people wanted me to paint their picture and
(30:44):
I was doing some really neat things. Yeah, it's it's
very unassuming, even when she's talking about how beautiful she
was as a young woman, and I just I clearly
love her. Pay so much for joining on this Saturday.
Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
heard an email address or a Facebook U r L
(31:05):
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health
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(31:26):
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from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
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Happy Saturday, everybody. It is Elizabeth Louise's birthday. So today's
Saturday Classic is our episode on her, which we just
missed having ready in time for her birthday when we
originally released it. She was born in April sixte and
this episode originally came out a month after her birthday.
On MA got a couple of points in this episode.
(00:25):
We mostly me mentioned getting images of our artwork to
use on our website, and if you have not been
to our website in a few years, we no longer
have episode specific artwork on there, but there's still just
a ton of her work available to look at online.
It is a quick Google image search away, so we
hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History
(00:50):
Class A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and well
come to the podcast. I'll try and I'm trade v Wilson.
And it hasn't actually happened as of when we are recording,
but by the time this episode comes out, we will
have recently passed the birthday of a very important French
(01:11):
artist and we do not have an episode on her.
This is what happens when we have to record like
an extra three week buffer of episodes ahead of time. Yeah,
time travel, time travel, which is fine. I kind of
wish I had thought to do it sooner in the
year so we could land this nearer her birthday, but
we didn't, uh. And A large part of her appeal
as a portrait artist was her ability to paint incredibly
(01:34):
flattering likenesses. She brought a lightness to her depictions that
gives them great life, and she actually made a good
living with her art. Although she always had aspirations of
working on sort of grand historical art, she was kept very,
very busy by a steady list of commissions, starting when
she was merely a teenager and lasting throughout her life.
Her works, which captured the likenesses of many royals and
(01:57):
nobles of her time, are seen literally throughout the world.
So if you google Marie Antoinette, you will undoubtedly see
several portraits painted by the subject of today's podcast, Elizabeth
Louise Holly is going to say that more beautifully than
me consistently throughout this entire episode. No, I'm sure I'm
clunking it up in my own magical way. So. Elizabeth
(02:20):
Louise Vijay was born in Paris on April sixteenth, seventeen
fifty five. Her father, Louis vj was a successful artist
who specialized in pastel portraits. Because of her father's work,
the Vijay family was afforded some access to intellectual circles
and society that otherwise would have been a little closed
off to them. As a consequence, even as a child,
(02:41):
Elizabeth received lessons and encouragement in her artistic pursuits by
some of the most popular artists of the day. Yeah,
she really was clearly going to be an artist no
matter what. She went to boarding school from the ages
of six to eleven, and, as I said, an artist
from the beginning. She spent most of her time, they're
drawing on just about every scrap of paper she came across.
(03:04):
She basically couldn't stop making art. She told one story
in her memoirs where she was sent outside and she
would draw in the sand and the dirt, portraits and
and little sketches while she was just standing there in
the yard, because she would rather be painting or drawing
than doing anything else. Because she was also a little
bit of a frail child, her parents would often take
(03:25):
her out of school for a few days at a time,
so she could go home and kind of recover, And
she apparently loved this because she absolutely adored her family.
She loved spending time with them, particularly her father, and
she also adored her younger brother, Etienne, who was born
three years after her. Once she was permanently removed from
boarding school, she was quite happy. But her bliss was
(03:46):
pretty short lived. Just a year later, her father became
seriously ill and he never recovered. He died when Elizabeth
was just twelve, and his last words to Elizabeth and
Etienne were be happy my children in and the way
her memoirs written, those might have been his last words period,
but it's not entirely clear, uh, which is so sad
(04:08):
and poignant, heartbreaking, And the death of her father was,
as you can imagine, really intense once she was very
young too. He had kind of been the center of
her universe, uh, and it really halted her interest in
art for a little while. She describes herself as being
unable to pick up her her pastels for a while.
(04:30):
But eventually the French painter Gabrielle Francois Doyen, who had
been a good friend of Louis vig urged Elizabeth to
return to her passion of drawing and painting as a
way of coping with her grief, and this is really
when she started working in earnest on portraiture. She also
started visiting galleries and museum exhibits with her mother, and
(04:50):
she became more fully immersed in studying the masters of painting.
She copied their styles and various portraits and studies. While
Louis had left no financial Christian for the family when
he died, she was able to make a little money
with her portrait work. But the money that was coming
in really wasn't enough to support Elizabeth, her mother, and
her brother, and so her mother remarried to a jeweler.
(05:13):
But the young woman Elizabeth continued to take portrait clients,
and by the age of fifteen, she had set up
a studio and began painting portraits basically as her profession,
and she quickly grew a considerable clientele. But the money
that she was making at this point went right to
her stepfather, a man who she pretty frankly detested. Her
clientele continued to grow, a fact that Elizabeth attributed not
(05:38):
only to her skill as a painter, but also her
own good looks. We have self portraits of her as
the artwork on our website for these episodes, and I
feel like I can see her kind of saying in
my mind, yes, I am quite pretty, not in an
arrogant way. She has a matter of fact, she's pretty
(05:59):
frank about it her memoirs, and she does sort of paint.
It's like, I'm not trying to brag, but people would
stare at me in public, like I was pretty because
my mother was pretty. Yes, so she would later write, quote,
since I have acknowledged that I was stared at in
the streets, the same is true of the theaters and
other public places, and that I was the object of
(06:20):
many attentions, that maybe it may readily be guessed that
some admirers of my face gave me commissions to paint theirs.
They hoped to get into my good graces this way.
And I kind of like though that she, while she
was very clear throughout her life that her art was
her passion, she almost tries to downplay her own skill
(06:40):
by going, oh, some of them just wanted to work
with me because I was pretty. Just kind of a
weird um yeah, like boast slash humbleness. At the same time,
I'm not. I'm really not sure what it is exactly
about her portraits that makes me feel like she's going, yes,
I am quite pretty. She was quite pretty. She also, though,
had this very funny way of diverting the attentions of
(07:02):
young men who had hired her, in her opinion, to
paint their portraits just so they could be with her. Uh.
And so she would pose them in such a way
that they would always have to be looking away from her,
And whenever she would catch them trying to move their
their eyes and gaze at her while she painted, she
would then say, I'm doing the eyes now, so that
they would have to return to the original position and
(07:22):
couldn't look at her. Uh. And she always had her
mother present when she was painting clients, and this amused
her mother as well. She was made a member of
the Painters Guild of the Academy de Saint Luke when
she was just nineteen, which significantly expanded her professional network
and brought in new clients. Uh. That same year, seventeen
seventy four, Elizabeth met Jean Baptiste Pierre Raboin, who was
(07:45):
an art dealer as well as an artist, and they
were neighbors and Elizabeth was eager to visit his home
to see his vast collections of art, and while Elizabeth
Vija was not thinking about marriage, she was making her
own money. At this point, she really didn't see any
to worry about getting married and finding a husband to
support her. Her mother really encouraged her towards Lebron romantically,
(08:06):
hoping to ensure a secure future for her daughter. They
got married two years later. Initially, they didn't announce their
marriage because Monsieur Lebrun was skipping out on an engagement
to the daughter of a Dutch client. During the time
their marriage was secret, Elizabeth received numerous warnings from friends
and clients that this man would not make a good husband.
(08:28):
He's bits of advice and dried up once the couple
went public. Four years into their marriage, they had a daughter,
Jean Julie Louise, and Elizabeth adored her baby girl. Yeah.
Can you imagine being married to someone on the down
low and having people come and go, hey, look, I
know you've been kind of serious with this guy. You
should not marry him. Yeah, he's kind of a jerk. Uh.
(08:49):
He was not a great husband. Um aside from being
a cheater and a frequent patron of prostitutes. He, like
Elizabeth's stepfather, took all of her earnings from her art,
and then he gambled all of that away. But Elizabeth
generally described him fairly kindly in her writing, despite his faults.
(09:10):
She wrote, quote, his character exhibited a mixture of gentleness
and liveliness. He was extremely obliging to everybody, and in
a word, quite an agreeable person. But his furious passion
for gambling was at the bottom of the ruin of
his fortune and my own, of which she had the
entire disposal. But while Jean Baptiste was not an ideal
(09:32):
as a spouse, his art collection was another matter. She
studied the many paintings and prints that he amassed with
great fervor. She really loved it, and in seventy two
the couple traveled to lepai Ba the Low Countries. So
a quick geography aside, just in case you do not
know uh that designation. The Low Countries is the name
(09:52):
given to the coastal region of northwestern Europe that includes Luxembourg,
the Netherlands, and Belgium. While traveling in the Low Country,
Elizabeth studied another Landish art, the glaze working color palette
of Rubens was especially impactful, and it shaped the young
woman's arn't going forward from that point, and we're about
(10:12):
to get to the moment in her life that really
launched career into the stratosphere. But before we do that,
we're going to pause for a word from one of
our sponsors, which she was only twenty three. J Lebrun
(10:37):
was commissioned for an incredibly prestigious task. She was to
paint the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. She described the
Queen at the time as incredibly lovely. Quote. Marie Antoinette
was tall and admirably built, being somewhat stout, but not
excessively so. Her arms were superb, her hands small and
perfectly formed, and her feet charming. She had the best
walk of any woman in France, carrying her head erect
(10:59):
with dignity that stamped her queen in the midst of
her whole court. Her majestic man, however, not the least
diminishing with sweetness and amiability of her face. To anyone
who has not seen the Queen, it is difficult to
get an idea of all the graces and all the
nobility combined in her person. And while Leo was initially
(11:20):
afraid of the queen, as I can't imagine anyone wouldn't
be kind of nervous doing a portrait for a royalty.
Marie Antoinette was apparently very gracious with the painter and
the two really became quite friendly. Eventually the pair would
sing together while the painter worked once she had heard
that Elizabeth was had a fairly good singing voice. They
(11:42):
liked to sing together while she sat for portraits, which
I find so charming. Uh. And Elizabeth's time and Versailles
working on that first portrait of Louis the sixteenth wife
really led to great success for the young artist. She
became a court artist and was well paid for the position.
She was the first woman to ever become an artist
to the king, so it was quite significant. And over
the course of the ten years from seventeen seventy nine
(12:04):
to seventeen eighty nine, Leboin painted thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette.
You've probably seen many of them. I would say. One
of the most famous ones that immediately comes to mind
when I imagine portraits of Marie Antoinette is one of hers. Yeah,
I mean several. If you'd like go through your head
and go, oh, there's that other portrait of Oh yeah,
(12:25):
and there's they're probably most of them are the ones
that Leboin painted. They're beautiful. Louis the sixteenth was also
a fan of all these portraits, and he once told
the painter quote, I know nothing about painting, but you
make me like it. I think that's so sweet. I mean,
he was a mess in many ways, but I find
that quote terribly charming. Becoming one of the queen's favorites
(12:47):
definitely had some benefits. In seventeen eighty three, it was
Marie Antoinette's influence that finally got the Academy Royal Pol
to accept Via Lebois as a member. This professional artist
organization of incredible prestige rarely accepted women, and Va Lebron
had been trying for years to get in, but her
husband's work as an art dealer had been a little
(13:09):
bit of a roadblock. It was kind of a sticking
point that maybe this was more of a business thing
than an art thing. And she was actually only one
of four women in the organization when she was admitted,
and she was and the fact that she was there
was it came with a little bit of a level
of resentment on the part of the organization. Basically, they
did not appreciate that they had been pressured by the
monarchy to accept Via Lebroin. But if you know anything
(13:33):
about Marie Antoinette, you know that anyone and everyone associated
with her eventually became mired in rumors and accusations as
a queen's tendency to attract scandal really radiated to all
of her friends. There was gossip that vj Lebron was
not actually an artist, but instead that her work was
done by a ghost painter, and that she had used
(13:55):
sexual prowess to raise her position in court. Throughout all
of this, the Vija Lebron painted. She created portraits of
many of the more famous figures of the Louis the
sixteenth court, including Madame du Berri and the Duchess de Polignac.
She had as many as three sittings per day on
her schedule, and she worked furiously to keep up with
(14:16):
the demand for her work. She really had an incredible
work ethic. She worked so hard that she actually became ill.
For a time, her digestion suffered. It became quite poor.
She was unable to eat, and she lost a great
deal of weight. The remedy, according to her doctor, was
to go to bed immediately after eating dinner, and that
sounds counter to a lot of modern advice. Most people
will say, don't go lie down with a heavy meal
(14:38):
on your stomach, but the painter really credited this habit
was saving her life, as she she really did regain
strength and put some weight back on following uh these
doctors orders. Vija Lebron was in many ways the toast
of the town at this sphase of her career. People
came to visit her at her at her home studio often,
although she believed some of them were also there to
see her husband's art collection, and she often hosted readings
(15:01):
by poets and impromptu opera performances. Despite being a favorite
of the Queen and part of a very vibrant French
social scene, vi Lebrun was not a slave to fashion.
She didn't really like the fashion of the day. She
found it fussy and sort of ridiculous in many ways,
and she often tried to persuade her subjects to abandon
their trendy clothing for simpler and more classical drapings when
(15:25):
she was painting them. If you look at a lot
of these portraits that she did, she does have them
kind of draped and just very simple robes, shawls, etcetera.
She had to have dresses specially made to go to
Versailles for her sittings with Marie Antoinette. She didn't just
have fancy clothes on hand. Uh. And she always did
her own hair, which I thought was sort of charming
(15:47):
as well. She also hated the powdered look of hair.
She constantly begged her clients to please sit with their
natural hair color and not powder their hair. As the
French Revolution heated up and sentiment again the royal court
really started to grow. Len eventually fled France for her
own safely safety things. It got to the point where
(16:08):
her home was targeted. People would shake their fists at
her when she left the house, and someone had thrown
sulfur into the cellar, which sounds awful. Yeah, I also wonder,
and I don't know, Uh, this is purely speculation, but
I wonder if that could potentially have damaged any paintings
like just the You know, if you think of an
(16:30):
oil painting, they take a long time to cure, and
I imagine having weird things in the air might do
some damage to some of it, but I don't know.
That's again just speculation on my part, a question mark
if anybody knows, right us and tell us. For a
long while, though, resisted her urge to leave France because
she didn't want to break the large number of commissions
that she had in her queue. She really worked constantly.
(16:53):
She always had people on basically a wait list just
waiting to be the to have an availability. But in
the fall of eight and she was so shaken by
some of the violent ends that many of her society
acquaintances were meeting that she had in fact decided to leave,
and so she packed her carriage and prepared her exit.
But the night before she was planning to go, several
(17:13):
armed men broke into her room, and they appeared to
be inebriated, and they harassed her for a while, but
they did eventually leave. Later, two of them came back
and told her that they were neighbors and meant her
no harm, but that she simply had to go. They
further advised her not to take her own carriage but
instead to take a stage coach. She took their advice
(17:34):
and a week later left on the first stage coach
she had been able to book, and so she was
moving and with her young daughter to Italy, and when
she did so, her French citizenship was revoked. She estimated
that in her career up to that point she had
earned more than a million francs, but thanks to her
husband's gambling, she had almost nothing to her name when
she fled. Returning to France was impossible for twelve years,
(17:58):
and during that time she traveled to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany,
and eventually Russia, which she really loved and she stayed
there for six years. Coming up, we'll get into a
bit of detail about some unfortunate events in St. Petersburg, Russia,
as well as the painters later life, But first we're
going to pause for a very word from a sponsor.
(18:28):
So during all of these travels, when she was outside
of France, Vi Lebois was painting portraits to earn a
living to support herself and her daughter. But this was
definitely not a case of an artist scraping by and
doing work for pittances. Elizabeth's reputation as an artist was
really impressive. She was basically welcomed into all of the
houses of rulers and dignitaries throughout any of the areas
(18:51):
she traveled in. They were all more than happy to
pay the gifted painter to create beautiful portraits of themselves
and their families. She lived quite well while he was
in exile. During her time away from France, Elizabeth and
her husband severed their ties. In seventeen ninety three, Jean
Baptiste Pierre Le divorced his wife under duress from revolutionary
(19:13):
authorities who labeled Elizabeth as a deserter for having fled
the country. And in addition to the portraits which were
her bread and butter, uh I just wanted to mention
that while she was traveling, she did hundreds, literally hundreds
of landscaped pieces during her travel, somewhere in oils and
somewhere in Pastel's and those are things that didn't always
(19:34):
get a lot of attention from the art world, but
they're getting a little bit more, uh interest now. While
she loved St. Petersburg, particularly her relationship with her daughter
suffered there. Jean Julie Louise had grown into a lovely girl, and,
like her mother before her, received a great deal of
attention from potential suitors. When Julie as she was called,
(19:55):
was seventeen. She fell in love with a man about
a dozen years older because they was Degree and he
was secretary to account and when visual Lebron got wind
of this budding romance, she was first of all heartbroken
at the thought of losing her daughter. We spoke when
we mentioned her baby girl being born that she was
really devoted to her, and that stayed the case throughout
(20:16):
her life. She was so devoted to her child. Uh.
But then she started to ask around to get information
and opinions on Degree, but the things that she was
hearing were something of a mixed bag. Some people really
loved him and others had really little good to say
about him. But more concerning to the mother was really
the fact it almost is a repeat of how she
(20:37):
got into her marriage with Lebron, uh, is that she
was concerned that Negree was not really well positioned. He
had an okay job, but he really didn't have like
a great job, and Elizabeth advised her daughter against marriage,
and it eventually drove a huge wedge between mother and daughter.
(20:58):
The couple married, and while Vija Lebrown fulfilled the duties
of the bride's family, including giving the couple a sum
of money from her recent commissions. She was not a
happy mother of the bride. When mother visited her newly
wet daughter in the weeks following the wedding, it appeared
that Julie wasn't especially happy either, although she was resigned
to stay and just as Visa, Lebron was coping with
(21:21):
the heartbreak of seeing her only child in what appeared
to be an unhappy marriage. Uh the artist's mother died,
and the combined stresses and unhappiness of these events really
took their toll, and in an effort to escape via
change of scenery, Lebron decided to head to Moscow in
eighteen o one, as Russia was itself in the midst
(21:42):
of political turmoil related to the French Revolution and shifting
loyalties via Lebron was once again ill. She continued to
suffer both physically and mentally, and then decided to leave
Russia and le Bron returned to Paris after making several
visits throughout cities in Europe. She kind of took a long,
circuitous route home and she was greeted by happy friends
(22:03):
and family who were overjoyed to see her once again.
Once She did reach Paris, but she really didn't feel
at home in the changed city in general. She wrote,
Paris has a less lively appearance to me. And seeing
the words liberty, fraternity, or death that were scrawled on
the walls around the city which had been part of
the revolution, really saddened her, and it reminded her of
(22:23):
what she what her life had once been, and what
she had lost because of her melancholy at being in
the city she had once loved so much. The Brown
moved to London in eighteen o two. She wasn't entirely
enamored with England either. She's found it rather drab and uninspiring,
and the damp climate meant that her paintings took a
(22:44):
really long time to dry. She didn't find the art
community entirely welcoming either, and some of them even printed
criticisms of the French school of art and all who
came from it. Yeah, she got kind of embroiled in
a back and forth with another artist who printed some
nasty things quite clearly aimed at her uh and she
wrote him a letter in defense of of the French
(23:06):
artists that circulated among society. Like everyone knew about this letter,
so it was good, not the best welcome in terms
of that, although she did have friends there. But shortly
after visual leb arrived in London, the treat of the
Treaty of Amiens was signed, and as part of that treaty,
any French person in England who had been there less
than a year was to be sent out of the country.
(23:29):
But because Elizabeth did move in illustrious circles, the Prince
of Wales was able to secure a special permission from
King George the Third that enabled her to stay. She
remained in England for almost three years, visiting all of
the royal residences and castles. You could possibly imagine. Her
memoir just sort of lists them one after the other.
It's like, and then I went to this place, and
here's what I thought of the gardens and their art collection.
(23:51):
And it's like a long travel log of all the
places she visited. But she did move back to Paris
in eighteen o five. She had really just gotten settled
into a life she quite enjoyed in England, with a
well cultivated social circle and plenty of enjoyable invitations just
about anywhere she might want to go. But she had
gotten word that her daughter had returned to Paris, and
(24:12):
she hurried to see her. Julie and her husband had
traveled to France on business, but when that business concluded,
Nigre returned to St. Petersburg. Julie did not, and in
her memoirs, Elizabeth is not the least bit subtle about
happy how happy the couple split made her. From eighteen
o five on, Elizabeth lived in France for the rest
(24:32):
of her life. She spent the time between Paris and
the country is She really loved being in the country.
It was very inspiring to her um. But then over
the course of seven years, there was a great deal
of heartbreak in vig Lebron's life. First, in eighteen thirteen,
her former husband Jean Baptiste died, and while they had
been divorced for some time, the death really did affect
(24:54):
her deeply, and she grieved for him. Six years later,
in eighteen nineteen, Jean Jowe Louise became ill and her
health rapidly deteriorated. When she died, Elizabeth was devastated, but
just one year later, Elizabeth's brother Etienne, also died. To
cope with her grief, be Lebron traveled to Bordeaux, a
(25:15):
town she wasn't really familiar with. The complete shift of
mindset from exclusively mourning to also discovering a new place
seems to have really helped the painter get through this
difficult time, and she reported that her health improved on
the journey, also that her spirit was quote less dark
when she returned to Paris, and from that point on
her brother's two daughters, her nieces Madame de Riviere and
(25:38):
Eugenia lebro became her dearest relatives and closest friends. In
eighteen thirty five, urged on by her friend Princess Helene
Delgaruki of Russia, via Lebrium, published the first volume of
her three volume memoir titled Souvenir Dema VI. The next
two volumes were published during the following two years, and
in the opening of that memoir, when to describing her
(26:00):
natural proclivity toward art, Lebron wrote a passage that really
beautifully encapsulated her whole life. She wrote, quote I mentioned
these facts to show what an inborn passion for the
art I possessed. Nor has that passion ever diminished. It
seems to me that it has even gone on growing
with time. For today. I feel under the spell of
it as much as ever, and shall I hope until
(26:23):
the hour of death. Lebrun died in Paris on March
forty two, at the age of eight six. And she
did really paint right up until the end of her life. Uh.
In October of last year, the first monographic exhibition of
visions Lebroin's work to be mounted in her home country
(26:44):
went on display at the Grand Palais in Paris, France.
That was also somewhere that she had visited as a child.
And that exhibit is now on tour, so if you
are lucky, you might be in a place where you
can see it. It is currently at the met in
New York until mid May. I actually posted one of
the portraits that she did a Marie Intoinette and her children.
It's the one people sometimes wonder about the empty baby bassinet,
(27:06):
and it's because they had lost their fourth child, so
that is depicted empty because the child is gone. UH.
That will be, as I said, in New York until May,
and then it moves to the National Gallery of Canada
in Ottawa in June. UH. And you can also check
out I think we have a we'll have a link
to um the either the METS page or another one
(27:27):
that will show the the travel schedule. I'm not sure
where it goes from there, but it's spectacular. I really
She's one of those artists that I have often admired
throughout the years, even before I realized, like all of
these portraits that I was in love with were all her. Yeah,
it was not a name that I immediately recognized, just
because on paper, to me, it looks like French soup.
(27:52):
So when I this morning before we recorded, I was
tracking down all the artwork that we would use when
we put us on our website, and I had just
plunged hern Aim into one of the stock image sources
that we use, and the only thing that it returned
was this portrait of Marie Antoinette. And I had this
moment where I was like, but that's Marie Antoinette, And
then oh, right now I completely recognized, like all this
(28:14):
woman's portraits because I've seen a lot of them and
they have a very uh there's a look about them
that you can recognize after you look at them for
a while. Yeah, Like I mentioned at the top, there's
a lightness to them, the way she used light in
her portraits was very lovely, and she really none of
her portraits ever have a heavy feel like, even when
(28:36):
she's using darker tones, they all just have sort of
a feeling of brightness and uh, just lightness, even the
sad ones. Incidentally, that that portrait that I had just
mentioned of Marie Antoinette with her children, which was kind
of commissioned by the king in an effort to portray
his wife, you know, as a loving mother in the
(28:57):
hopes of kind of fixing a little bit of her
image at the time time, is one that La mentions
in her memoirs that the revolution or Marie Antoinette's grief
over the loss of that baby really saved that piece
of art from the revolution because it was in the
hall and Marie Antoinette would have to walk by it
(29:17):
on her way, I believe, to her dressing room, and
she finally was like, I can't look at this painting anymore.
It makes me sad every time I see it, and
it's too upsetting, and so they took it down, and
that's why it was not one of the things that
was damaged when the palace was ransacked. So sort of
grief sort of saved that portrait for us, So we're
lucky in that regard. But yeah, I just her memoirs.
(29:39):
I highly recommend. They're a pretty fun read. They're very lighthearted.
It's kind of interesting because she had this marriage that
wasn't great. You know, she had had a stepfather she
was not very fond of. Even when she's talking about
these deaths that really impacted her, she kind of whips
by them pretty quickly. She keeps it very light and
a lot of her memoirs are about the fabulous parties
she went to and fabulous people she met, and sort
(30:02):
of she was really into the social scene. And to me,
it's an interesting juxtaposition because someone that writes so much
like that, you wouldn't expect to be a completely devoted workhorse.
But she was basically like working her tail off all
day long to do all of these sittings and paint
portraits and keep up with her client list, and then
at night she was going to fabulous parties. And it
was just like this terrific life that she had put
(30:23):
together for herself that she really seemed to love. Like
she was like, I designed this life, I'm living it,
and I love it, and it's very admirable, and she
kind of doesn't even um tend to focus very much
on the fact that she was kind of breaking a
lot of glass ceilings for women artists at the time.
She's just like, oh, yeah, you know, I was cute,
so some people wanted me to paint their picture and
(30:44):
I was doing some really neat things. Yeah, it's it's
very unassuming, even when she's talking about how beautiful she
was as a young woman, and I just I clearly
love her. Pay so much for joining on this Saturday.
Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
heard an email address or a Facebook U r L
(31:05):
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health
stuff works email address no longer works, and you can
find us all over social media at missed in History
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
(31:26):
Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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