Souvenirs: From a Memoir

by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Anne Higonnet (introduction)

184 pages, Paperback

Published May 20, 2025

About the author

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun - also known as Madame Lebrun or Madame Le Brun - was a prominent French portrait painter of the late eighteenth century.

Her artistic style is generally considered part of the aftermath of Rococo with elements of an adopted Neoclassical style. Her subject matter and color palette can be classified as Rococo, but her style is aligned with the emergence of Neoclassicism. Vigée Le Brun created a name for herself in Ancien Régime society by serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette. She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers, and was elected to art academies in ten cities.

Vigée Le Brun created some 660 portraits and 200 landscapes. In addition to many works in private collections, her paintings are owned by major museums, such as the Louvre, Hermitage Museum, National Gallery in London, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and many other collections in continental Europe and the United States.

Reviews

[Jill]

3.5 stars. Such a pleasant way to spend a Revolution where the majority of one’s friends lost their heads. Vigee LeBrun was obviously an extremely talented woman who did things that very few women of her time did. She was a true vagabond artist (while living and traveling in extremely high-born circles.) who preferred to live and travel alone. (Shown by her complete lack of mentioning her daughter except for her birth and death.) But she was a true artist and I wouldn’t be surprised if a male artist never mentioned his children. There’s a lot of name dropping but it’s interesting to hear about all her travels and what was going on in the upper echelons during the late 1700’s/early 1800’s. A complete badass, one of my favorite parts is a letter she wrote to a male London artist who had criticized her work and lifestyle. She mansplains to him better than any man could where he was 100% wrong. I want to dislike her but I absolutely can’t. Worth a read.

[Beatrice]

“Vigée le Brun wrote her story as if it were not ordinary but completely normal for a woman artist to move in the most elite circles of society, charge top prices, have praise heaped on her work, reconcile a career with maternity, and look forward to her paintings hanging in the greatest museums of the world.”

Honestly wondering how I’d never come across her name until seeing her work at the V&A…A dangerously seductive memoir as it romanticises pre-French revolution era and I almost fell for it lol

[Maggie Azary]

such a funny book about vigee le brun being worried for her royal friends during the revolution.

no but I did genuinely love