May 18, 2016 • 34 mins
No starving artist, Vigée Le Brun was the first woman to ever become a court painter in France when she was commissioned to paint Marie Antoinette. She painted royalty and nobility throughout Europe, even as her personal life had its ups and downs.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Try and I'm trade Pob Wilson. And it hasn't actually
happened as when we are recording, but by the time
this episode comes out, we will have recently passed the
(00:22):
birthday and a very important French 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
(00:45):
was her ability to paint incredibly 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
(01:07):
captured the likenesses of many royals and 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
(01:29):
in my own magical way. So. Elizabeth Louise Vijay was
born in Paris on April sixteen, seventeen fifty five. Her father,
Louis vj was a successful artist who specialized in pastel portraits.
Because of her father's work, the Vjay family was afforded
some access to intellectual circles and society that otherwise would
(01:49):
have been a little closed off to them. As a consequence,
even as a child, 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
(02:11):
I said, an artist from the beginning. She spent most
of her time there drawing on just about every scrap
of paper she came across. She basically couldn't stop making arts.
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
(02:32):
be painting or drawing than doing anything else. Because she
was also a little bit of a frail child, her
parents would often take 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
at the Inn, who was born three years after her.
(02:54):
Once she was permanently removed from boarding school, she was
quite happy, but her bliss was 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. And the way her memoirs written, those might
(03:15):
have been his last words period, but it's not entirely clear, uh,
which is so sad 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
(03:37):
describes herself as being unable to pick up her her
pastels for a while. 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
(03:57):
on portraiture. She also started visiting galleries and museum exhibits
with her mother, and 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
(04:18):
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. 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,
(04:39):
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 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,
(05:00):
and I feel like I can see her kind of
staying in my mind. Yes, I am quite pretty, not
in an arrogant way. She has a matter of fact,
she's pretty frank about it in 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
(05:23):
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 many attentions that maybe it may
readily be guessed that some admirers of my face gave
me commissions to paint their's. They hoped to get into
my good graces this way, And I kind of like
(05:46):
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 by going, oh, some of
them just wanted to work me because I was pretty
just kind of a weird um yeah, like we boast
slash humbleness at the same time, I'm not. I'm really
not sure what it is exactly about her portraits that
(06:06):
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 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
(06:28):
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 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
(06:51):
brought in new clients. Uh that same year, seventeen seventy four,
Elizabeth met Jean Baptiste Pierre Rabin, who was 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 Ja was
not thinking about marriage, she was making her own money
at this point, she really didn't see a need to
(07:12):
worry about getting married and finding a husband to support her.
Her mother really encouraged her towards Libra romantically, 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
(07:34):
was secret, Elizabeth received numerous warnings from friends and clients
that this man would not make a good husband, 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
(07:56):
you've been kind of serious with this guy. You should
not marry him. He's kind of a jerk. Uh. 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
(08:18):
him fairly kindly in her writing. Despite his faults. She wrote, quote,
his character exhibited a mixture of gentleness and liveliness. He
was extremely obliging to everybody, and in a word, quite
unagreeable person. But his furious passion for gambling was at
the bottom of the ruin of his fortune and my own,
(08:39):
of which he had the entire disposal. But while Jean
Baptiste was not an ideal 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 the paid
Ba the Low Countries. So a quick graphy aside, just
(09:00):
in case you do not know, uh, that designation. The
Low Countries is the name given to the coastal region
of northwestern Europe that includes Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
While traveling in the Low Countries, Elizabeth studied nether Landish art.
The glaze work and color palette of Rubens was especially
impactful and it shaped the young woman's arn't going forward
(09:23):
from that point, and we're about 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
(09:45):
only twenty three. J Lebron 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 style but not excessively so. Her arms were superb,
her hands small and perfectly formed than her feet charming,
(10:06):
she had the best walk of any woman in France,
carrying her head erect with a dignity that stamped her
queen in the midst of her whole court. Her majestic man, however,
not the least diminishing the 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 was
(10:30):
initially 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
(10:52):
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 artists. 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
(11:14):
to seventeen eighty nine, Leboin painted thirty portraits of Marie
an Twinette. 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 an Twinette 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, and there's they're probably most of
(11:37):
them are the ones that Leboin painted. They're beautiful. Maie
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 definitely had some benefits. In
(11:59):
seventeen eighty three, it was Marie Antoinette's influence that finally
got the Academy Royal de Pentol to accept via Lebroin
as a member. This professional artists organization of incredible prestige
rarely accepted women, and Visa Lebroin had been trying for
years to get in, but her husband's work as an
art dealer had been a little bit of a roadblock.
(12:20):
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.
(12:41):
But if you know anything about Marie Antoinette, you know
that anyone and everyone associated with her eventually became mired
in rumors and accusations as the Queen's tendency to attract
scandal really radiated to all of her friends. There was
gossip that j Lebron was not actually an artist, but
instead that her work was done by a ghost painter,
(13:04):
and that she had used sexual prowess to raise her
position in court. Throughout all of this gossip the Vija
Lebron painted. She created portraits of many of the more
famous figures of the Louis the sixteenth Court, including Madame
Duberry and the Duchess de Polignac. She had as many
as three sittings per day on her schedule, and she
(13:24):
worked furiously to keep up with 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
(13:44):
of modern advice. Most people will say, don't go lie
down with a heavy meal 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. VJ. Lebron was
in anways the toast of the town at the space
of her career. People came to visit her at her
(14:05):
at her home studio often, although she believes some of
them were also there to see her husband's art. Collection,
and she often hosted readings by poets and impromptu opera performances.
Despite being a favorite of the Queen and part of
a very vibrant French social scene, vision, Lebrun was not
a slave to fashion. She didn't really like the fashion
of the day. She found it fussy and sort of
(14:27):
ridiculous in many ways, and she often tried to persuade
her subjects to abandon their trendy clothing for simpler and
more classical drapings when 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
(14:47):
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 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.
(15:07):
As the French Revolution heated up and sentiment against the
royal court really started to grow, eventually fled France for
her own safety safety things. It got to the point
where 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 all yeah. I
(15:30):
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 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
(15:50):
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 cue. She really worked constantly.
She always had people on basically a wait list, just
waiting to be the to have an availability. But in
the fall of seventeen nine, she was so shaken by
(16:11):
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
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
(16:33):
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
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
(16:56):
that in her career up to that point she had
earned more than a millions, 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, and during
that time she traveled to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and eventually Russia,
which she really loved and she stayed there for six years.
(17:17):
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 by word from a sponsor. So during all
of these travels, when she was outside of France, Leboin
(17:39):
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 she traveled in. They
were all more than happy to pay the gifted painter
(18:02):
to create beautiful portraits of themselves and their families. She
lived quite well while she was in exile. During her
time away from France, Elizabeth and her husband severed their ties.
In seventeen nine three, Jean Baptiste Pierre Lebron divorced his
wife under duress from revolutionary authorities who labeled Elizabeth as
(18:22):
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 uh during
her travels, somewhere in oils and somewhere in Pastel's And
those are things that didn't always get a lot of
attention from the art world, but they're getting a little
(18:45):
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, was seventeen, she fell
in love with a man about a dozen years older.
(19:06):
His name was Agree and he was secretary to account
And when 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 her life. She was so
devoted to her child. Uh. But then she started to
(19:28):
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 as
a repeat of how she got into her marriage with
Lebron Uh is that she was concerned that Negree was
(19:51):
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. 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
(20:12):
recent commissions, she was not a happy mother of the bride.
When mother visited her newly webb 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 Vija
Lebron was coping with the heartbreak of seeing her only
child in what appeared to be an unhappy marriage, Uh,
(20:32):
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 of political turmoil related to the
French Revolution and shifting loyalties, vi Lebron was once again ill.
(20:55):
She continued to suffer both physically and mentally, and then
decided to leave Russia and 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 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.
(21:18):
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 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.
(21:39):
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 that the damp climate meant that
her paintings took a 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
(22:01):
kind of embroiled in a back and forth with another
artist who printed some nasty things really quite clearly aimed
at her. Uh and she wrote him a letter in
defense of of the French 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
(22:22):
did have friends there. But shortly after VI 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. But because Elizabeth did
move in illustrious circles, the Prince of Wales was able
to secure a special permission from King George the Third
(22:43):
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 listing
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. 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
(23:05):
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 she hurried to see her.
Julie and her husband had traveled to France on business,
but when that business concluded, Nigri returned to St. Petersburg.
(23:27):
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 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,
(23:49):
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 her deeply, and she grieved for him.
Six years later, in eighteen nineteen, Jean Joe Louise became
ill and her health rapidly deteriorated. When she died, Elizabeth
(24:12):
was devastated, but just one year later, Elizabeth's brother Etienne
also died. To cope with her grief, be Lebron traveled
to Bordeaux, a 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
(24:33):
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 Eugenia le became her dearest relatives and
closest friends. In eighteen thirty five, urged on by her
friend Princess Helene Delguruki of Russia, v Lebrium published the
(24:56):
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 describing her
natural proclivity towards 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
(25:18):
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
the hour of death. Le Brun died in Paris on
March forty two, at the age of eighty six, and
(25:39):
she did really paint right up until the end of
her life. Uh In October of last year, so the
first monographic exhibition of vision Lebron's work to be mounted
in her home country 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
(26:00):
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
in Marie Antoinette and her children. It's the one people
sometimes wonder about the empty baby bassinet, and it's because
they had lost their fourth child, so that is depicted
empty because the child is gone. Uh. That will be,
(26:21):
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 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
(26:41):
of those artists that uh, 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.
So why and I This morning before we recorded, I
(27:02):
was tracking down all the artwork that we would use
when we put us on our website, and I had
just plunged her name into one of the stock image
sources that we use, and the only thing that it
returned was this portrait of Marie an't Whinett, 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 woman's portraits because I've seen a lot of them
(27:23):
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 she's using darker tones, they all just have sort
(27:45):
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 hopes of kind of fixing a little bit of
(28:05):
her image at the time, is one that 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 on
her way, I believe, to her dressing room, and she
(28:26):
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.
I highly recommend. They're a pretty fun read. They're very lighthearted.
(28:50):
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 party
she went to and the fabulous people she met, and
sort of she was really into the social scene, and
(29:11):
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 together for herself that she really seemed to love.
(29:33):
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 who wanted me to paint their picture
and I was doing some really neat things. Yeah. It's
(29:54):
very unassuming, even when she's talking about how beautiful she
was as a young woman, and I just I clearly
love her. Uh you wanna hear some listener mail and
stop hearing me fan girl about lebron The fan gurlink
finds you. I would love to listener mail, though I
have to postcards. I'm trying to keep up with postcards,
but we get so many, so I apologize. I know
we always do this, but I apologize for everybody who
(30:14):
I don't read, because we get lots of good ones.
This first one is I believe from Kelsey. It is
once again one of those things that is victimized by
the postal service markings. Uh and it is uh a
postcard of Sally Lund's house in Bath, and she will
tell us about it in her thing says Hello from
an American reader in England. I was lucky enough to
(30:35):
visit beautiful historic Bath recently and your podcast made the
long bus ride of delight. I had dinner and of
course tea at Sally Lund's, the oldest house in Bath,
and their basement is a cool museum where you can
see the layers of floors over the centuries and the
original even Sally used. Thank you so much. This is
a really lovely postcard. I'm kind of entranced by all
of the beautile, beautiful um flowers outside of the house,
(30:57):
as well as the pictures of what look to be
beauty full, beautiful pieces of bread. Uh. The other one
that we got is from our listeners Sasha and Richard,
and they used a really cool service called touch note.
Or they're not an advertiser for us, but man, did
this make a beautiful postcard? Uh? And she says, my
boyfriend and I recently listened to your podcast, The Great
Vowel Shift, and we're overjoyed that you got the information
(31:19):
about the Celts right. We both studied abroad in Cork, Ireland,
two springs ago, and our archaeology teacher was very passionate
about all the misconceptions. The following spring in a history
class at my university, I gave a presentation because everything
about them in our textbook was wrong. I'll try to
find the power point. I made an email it to you.
Keep up the good work. Sasha and Richard. They are
(31:39):
from California, but they currently live in Oxford, UK, and
she sent us a cool um postcard that was created
uh and their travels in Ireland of a fairy glade
and it's just lovely. And like I said, this is
a cool service. I did not know about touch note,
and now I'm gonna look into it because it made
a beautiful custom printed postcard where her writing is also
printed out, so it's super easy to read, Yeah, it's
(32:02):
a little laminate postcard. I love it. I I only
heard this postcard for the first time just now because,
as most of us know, I don't work in the
same office as you anymore. Um, but I was making
the most delighted face. I was not prepared for how
many people would be so delighted and thankful that I
said that the Celts were not one monolithic culture that
(32:25):
somehow was like the thing in in Britain before uh,
before the Norman invasion. Like multiple people have been like,
that's so amazing that you said that. Yeah. Unfortunately it
it gets shorthanded in a way that really it's not accurate, right. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can
(32:46):
do so our email addresses, history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can meet up with us at
Facebook dot com, slash mist in history on Twitter at
mist in History, on Pinterest dot com, slash mist in
history at mist in history dot tema dot com. Do
you want I guess what our Instagram handle is. It's
missed in History. If you want to research a little
(33:07):
bit related to what we talked about today, you can
go to our parents site how stuff works. Do a
search for Marian twin it, and you'll give a few
different articles that touch on her, but one of them.
One of the things that I find interesting is that,
just as a case in point, the lead image art
for pretty much any article we have is a portrait.
They're all various different portraits by vij and the Bomb,
(33:28):
so it's it's Germaine to what we talked about, as
well as having some interesting Marian Twine topics. If you
would like to visit us, you can do that at
missed in history dot com and we have show notes
for all of our episodes since Tracy and I have
been on the podcast. We also have every episode of
the podcast ever going back to the original hosts when
it was just a very short show, and you can
(33:48):
come and visit us to come to miss industry dot
com and come to house cooms dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is how stuff
Works dot com, even even h
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Try and I'm trade Pob Wilson. And it hasn't actually
happened as when we are recording, but by the time
this episode comes out, we will have recently passed the
(00:22):
birthday and a very important French 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
(00:45):
was her ability to paint incredibly 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
(01:07):
captured the likenesses of many royals and 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
(01:29):
in my own magical way. So. Elizabeth Louise Vijay was
born in Paris on April sixteen, seventeen fifty five. Her father,
Louis vj was a successful artist who specialized in pastel portraits.
Because of her father's work, the Vjay family was afforded
some access to intellectual circles and society that otherwise would
(01:49):
have been a little closed off to them. As a consequence,
even as a child, 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
(02:11):
I said, an artist from the beginning. She spent most
of her time there drawing on just about every scrap
of paper she came across. She basically couldn't stop making arts.
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
(02:32):
be painting or drawing than doing anything else. Because she
was also a little bit of a frail child, her
parents would often take 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
at the Inn, who was born three years after her.
(02:54):
Once she was permanently removed from boarding school, she was
quite happy, but her bliss was 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. And the way her memoirs written, those might
(03:15):
have been his last words period, but it's not entirely clear, uh,
which is so sad 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
(03:37):
describes herself as being unable to pick up her her
pastels for a while. 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
(03:57):
on portraiture. She also started visiting galleries and museum exhibits
with her mother, and 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
(04:18):
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. 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,
(04:39):
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 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,
(05:00):
and I feel like I can see her kind of
staying in my mind. Yes, I am quite pretty, not
in an arrogant way. She has a matter of fact,
she's pretty frank about it in 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
(05:23):
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 many attentions that maybe it may
readily be guessed that some admirers of my face gave
me commissions to paint their's. They hoped to get into
my good graces this way, And I kind of like
(05:46):
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 by going, oh, some of
them just wanted to work me because I was pretty
just kind of a weird um yeah, like we boast
slash humbleness at the same time, I'm not. I'm really
not sure what it is exactly about her portraits that
(06:06):
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 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
(06:28):
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 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
(06:51):
brought in new clients. Uh that same year, seventeen seventy four,
Elizabeth met Jean Baptiste Pierre Rabin, who was 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 Ja was
not thinking about marriage, she was making her own money
at this point, she really didn't see a need to
(07:12):
worry about getting married and finding a husband to support her.
Her mother really encouraged her towards Libra romantically, 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
(07:34):
was secret, Elizabeth received numerous warnings from friends and clients
that this man would not make a good husband, 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
(07:56):
you've been kind of serious with this guy. You should
not marry him. He's kind of a jerk. Uh. 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
(08:18):
him fairly kindly in her writing. Despite his faults. She wrote, quote,
his character exhibited a mixture of gentleness and liveliness. He
was extremely obliging to everybody, and in a word, quite
unagreeable person. But his furious passion for gambling was at
the bottom of the ruin of his fortune and my own,
(08:39):
of which he had the entire disposal. But while Jean
Baptiste was not an ideal 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 the paid
Ba the Low Countries. So a quick graphy aside, just
(09:00):
in case you do not know, uh, that designation. The
Low Countries is the name given to the coastal region
of northwestern Europe that includes Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
While traveling in the Low Countries, Elizabeth studied nether Landish art.
The glaze work and color palette of Rubens was especially
impactful and it shaped the young woman's arn't going forward
(09:23):
from that point, and we're about 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
(09:45):
only twenty three. J Lebron 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 style but not excessively so. Her arms were superb,
her hands small and perfectly formed than her feet charming,
(10:06):
she had the best walk of any woman in France,
carrying her head erect with a dignity that stamped her
queen in the midst of her whole court. Her majestic man, however,
not the least diminishing the 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 was
(10:30):
initially 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
(10:52):
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 artists. 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
(11:14):
to seventeen eighty nine, Leboin painted thirty portraits of Marie
an Twinette. 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 an Twinette 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, and there's they're probably most of
(11:37):
them are the ones that Leboin painted. They're beautiful. Maie
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 definitely had some benefits. In
(11:59):
seventeen eighty three, it was Marie Antoinette's influence that finally
got the Academy Royal de Pentol to accept via Lebroin
as a member. This professional artists organization of incredible prestige
rarely accepted women, and Visa Lebroin had been trying for
years to get in, but her husband's work as an
art dealer had been a little bit of a roadblock.
(12:20):
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.
(12:41):
But if you know anything about Marie Antoinette, you know
that anyone and everyone associated with her eventually became mired
in rumors and accusations as the Queen's tendency to attract
scandal really radiated to all of her friends. There was
gossip that j Lebron was not actually an artist, but
instead that her work was done by a ghost painter,
(13:04):
and that she had used sexual prowess to raise her
position in court. Throughout all of this gossip the Vija
Lebron painted. She created portraits of many of the more
famous figures of the Louis the sixteenth Court, including Madame
Duberry and the Duchess de Polignac. She had as many
as three sittings per day on her schedule, and she
(13:24):
worked furiously to keep up with 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
(13:44):
of modern advice. Most people will say, don't go lie
down with a heavy meal 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. VJ. Lebron was
in anways the toast of the town at the space
of her career. People came to visit her at her
(14:05):
at her home studio often, although she believes some of
them were also there to see her husband's art. Collection,
and she often hosted readings by poets and impromptu opera performances.
Despite being a favorite of the Queen and part of
a very vibrant French social scene, vision, Lebrun was not
a slave to fashion. She didn't really like the fashion
of the day. She found it fussy and sort of
(14:27):
ridiculous in many ways, and she often tried to persuade
her subjects to abandon their trendy clothing for simpler and
more classical drapings when 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
(14:47):
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 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.
(15:07):
As the French Revolution heated up and sentiment against the
royal court really started to grow, eventually fled France for
her own safety safety things. It got to the point
where 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 all yeah. I
(15:30):
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 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
(15:50):
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 cue. She really worked constantly.
She always had people on basically a wait list, just
waiting to be the to have an availability. But in
the fall of seventeen nine, she was so shaken by
(16:11):
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
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
(16:33):
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
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
(16:56):
that in her career up to that point she had
earned more than a millions, 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, and during
that time she traveled to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and eventually Russia,
which she really loved and she stayed there for six years.
(17:17):
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 by word from a sponsor. So during all
of these travels, when she was outside of France, Leboin
(17:39):
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 she traveled in. They
were all more than happy to pay the gifted painter
(18:02):
to create beautiful portraits of themselves and their families. She
lived quite well while she was in exile. During her
time away from France, Elizabeth and her husband severed their ties.
In seventeen nine three, Jean Baptiste Pierre Lebron divorced his
wife under duress from revolutionary authorities who labeled Elizabeth as
(18:22):
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 uh during
her travels, somewhere in oils and somewhere in Pastel's And
those are things that didn't always get a lot of
attention from the art world, but they're getting a little
(18:45):
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, was seventeen, she fell
in love with a man about a dozen years older.
(19:06):
His name was Agree and he was secretary to account
And when 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 her life. She was so
devoted to her child. Uh. But then she started to
(19:28):
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 as
a repeat of how she got into her marriage with
Lebron Uh is that she was concerned that Negree was
(19:51):
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. 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
(20:12):
recent commissions, she was not a happy mother of the bride.
When mother visited her newly webb 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 Vija
Lebron was coping with the heartbreak of seeing her only
child in what appeared to be an unhappy marriage, Uh,
(20:32):
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 of political turmoil related to the
French Revolution and shifting loyalties, vi Lebron was once again ill.
(20:55):
She continued to suffer both physically and mentally, and then
decided to leave Russia and 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 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.
(21:18):
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 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.
(21:39):
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 that the damp climate meant that
her paintings took a 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
(22:01):
kind of embroiled in a back and forth with another
artist who printed some nasty things really quite clearly aimed
at her. Uh and she wrote him a letter in
defense of of the French 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
(22:22):
did have friends there. But shortly after VI 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. But because Elizabeth did
move in illustrious circles, the Prince of Wales was able
to secure a special permission from King George the Third
(22:43):
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 listing
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. 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
(23:05):
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 she hurried to see her.
Julie and her husband had traveled to France on business,
but when that business concluded, Nigri returned to St. Petersburg.
(23:27):
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 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,
(23:49):
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 her deeply, and she grieved for him.
Six years later, in eighteen nineteen, Jean Joe Louise became
ill and her health rapidly deteriorated. When she died, Elizabeth
(24:12):
was devastated, but just one year later, Elizabeth's brother Etienne
also died. To cope with her grief, be Lebron traveled
to Bordeaux, a 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
(24:33):
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 Eugenia le became her dearest relatives and
closest friends. In eighteen thirty five, urged on by her
friend Princess Helene Delguruki of Russia, v Lebrium published the
(24:56):
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 describing her
natural proclivity towards 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
(25:18):
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
the hour of death. Le Brun died in Paris on
March forty two, at the age of eighty six, and
(25:39):
she did really paint right up until the end of
her life. Uh In October of last year, so the
first monographic exhibition of vision Lebron's work to be mounted
in her home country 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
(26:00):
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
in Marie Antoinette and her children. It's the one people
sometimes wonder about the empty baby bassinet, and it's because
they had lost their fourth child, so that is depicted
empty because the child is gone. Uh. That will be,
(26:21):
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 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
(26:41):
of those artists that uh, 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.
So why and I This morning before we recorded, I
(27:02):
was tracking down all the artwork that we would use
when we put us on our website, and I had
just plunged her name into one of the stock image
sources that we use, and the only thing that it
returned was this portrait of Marie an't Whinett, 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 woman's portraits because I've seen a lot of them
(27:23):
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 she's using darker tones, they all just have sort
(27:45):
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 hopes of kind of fixing a little bit of
(28:05):
her image at the time, is one that 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 on
her way, I believe, to her dressing room, and she
(28:26):
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.
I highly recommend. They're a pretty fun read. They're very lighthearted.
(28:50):
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 party
she went to and the fabulous people she met, and
sort of she was really into the social scene, and
(29:11):
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 together for herself that she really seemed to love.
(29:33):
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 who wanted me to paint their picture
and I was doing some really neat things. Yeah. It's
(29:54):
very unassuming, even when she's talking about how beautiful she
was as a young woman, and I just I clearly
love her. Uh you wanna hear some listener mail and
stop hearing me fan girl about lebron The fan gurlink
finds you. I would love to listener mail, though I
have to postcards. I'm trying to keep up with postcards,
but we get so many, so I apologize. I know
we always do this, but I apologize for everybody who
(30:14):
I don't read, because we get lots of good ones.
This first one is I believe from Kelsey. It is
once again one of those things that is victimized by
the postal service markings. Uh and it is uh a
postcard of Sally Lund's house in Bath, and she will
tell us about it in her thing says Hello from
an American reader in England. I was lucky enough to
(30:35):
visit beautiful historic Bath recently and your podcast made the
long bus ride of delight. I had dinner and of
course tea at Sally Lund's, the oldest house in Bath,
and their basement is a cool museum where you can
see the layers of floors over the centuries and the
original even Sally used. Thank you so much. This is
a really lovely postcard. I'm kind of entranced by all
of the beautile, beautiful um flowers outside of the house,
(30:57):
as well as the pictures of what look to be
beauty full, beautiful pieces of bread. Uh. The other one
that we got is from our listeners Sasha and Richard,
and they used a really cool service called touch note.
Or they're not an advertiser for us, but man, did
this make a beautiful postcard? Uh? And she says, my
boyfriend and I recently listened to your podcast, The Great
Vowel Shift, and we're overjoyed that you got the information
(31:19):
about the Celts right. We both studied abroad in Cork, Ireland,
two springs ago, and our archaeology teacher was very passionate
about all the misconceptions. The following spring in a history
class at my university, I gave a presentation because everything
about them in our textbook was wrong. I'll try to
find the power point. I made an email it to you.
Keep up the good work. Sasha and Richard. They are
(31:39):
from California, but they currently live in Oxford, UK, and
she sent us a cool um postcard that was created
uh and their travels in Ireland of a fairy glade
and it's just lovely. And like I said, this is
a cool service. I did not know about touch note,
and now I'm gonna look into it because it made
a beautiful custom printed postcard where her writing is also
printed out, so it's super easy to read, Yeah, it's
(32:02):
a little laminate postcard. I love it. I I only
heard this postcard for the first time just now because,
as most of us know, I don't work in the
same office as you anymore. Um, but I was making
the most delighted face. I was not prepared for how
many people would be so delighted and thankful that I
said that the Celts were not one monolithic culture that
(32:25):
somehow was like the thing in in Britain before uh,
before the Norman invasion. Like multiple people have been like,
that's so amazing that you said that. Yeah. Unfortunately it
it gets shorthanded in a way that really it's not accurate, right. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can
(32:46):
do so our email addresses, history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can meet up with us at
Facebook dot com, slash mist in history on Twitter at
mist in History, on Pinterest dot com, slash mist in
history at mist in history dot tema dot com. Do
you want I guess what our Instagram handle is. It's
missed in History. If you want to research a little
(33:07):
bit related to what we talked about today, you can
go to our parents site how stuff works. Do a
search for Marian twin it, and you'll give a few
different articles that touch on her, but one of them.
One of the things that I find interesting is that,
just as a case in point, the lead image art
for pretty much any article we have is a portrait.
They're all various different portraits by vij and the Bomb,
(33:28):
so it's it's Germaine to what we talked about, as
well as having some interesting Marian Twine topics. If you
would like to visit us, you can do that at
missed in history dot com and we have show notes
for all of our episodes since Tracy and I have
been on the podcast. We also have every episode of
the podcast ever going back to the original hosts when
it was just a very short show, and you can
(33:48):
come and visit us to come to miss industry dot
com and come to house cooms dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is how stuff
Works dot com, even even h
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