Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun
An eighteenth-century French portraitist, Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, a beautiful and calculating careerist, was truly adored by Queen Marie Antoinette and hated by Empress Catherine II.
Elizabeth Vigee's paintings and drawings had one valuable quality - to please the public at first sight. By the age of sixteen, she already had regular customers. Moreover, some especially nimble admirers specially signed up for portraits in order to ingratiate themselves with the artist - a cheerful and very pretty person.
Soon, a fateful order for the young artist followed - she was invited to Versailles to paint a portrait of the queen herself. Marie Antoinette was extremely pleased with the portrait, and the artist's reward was her acceptance in 1783 as a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (she was a member of eight academies, including the Russian Academy of Arts). Portraits of Marie-Antoinette - half-length, full-length, surrounded by children and others - Vigee-Lebrun will write at least thirty.
According to her own list of Vigee-Lebrun, she became the author of 662 portraits, 15 paintings of historical and allegorical content and 15 landscapes.
The artist's style is usually characterized as an elegant and very solid drawing, with a pleasant and very harmonious color and free writing technique.
