30 Aug, 2016
Get to know Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun at the National Gallery
Posted by andrea tomkins in: Ottawa
I forgot to mention that it was my birthday awhile back. (That was back on the 19th FYI.) I endeavour to do things that Make Me Feel Alive on my birthday, so I was quite happy when Mark suggested we bike down to the National Gallery and take in an exhibition I’ve been talking about for months.
Our youngest was working the day of our excursion, but the three remaining fishies were not, so we hopped on our bikes and went. Sidebar: It was hot. Soooo very hot. And whoever said it was cooler by the river? Ha. Ha. No. A hot wind was blowing off the water, right in our faces, both on our way to the gallery and from the gallery. I kid ye not.
All that being said, it was actually a lovely ride. If you take the cycling path along the parkway from Westboro towards downtown Ottawa, you eventually end up right underneath the parliament buildings and the Rideau Lock. It’s is very pretty! This is an adventure in itself, but our goal was the Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun exhibition, which ends September 11. She was Marie Antoinette’s portraitist and as a female artist in revolutionary France, her life story is truly remarkable.
I have three words for you: GO.GO.GO.
I debated writing a small essay about her importance as an artist, her surviving the French revolution – both personally and professionally – the challenges she had as a female artist, not to mention all the history she captured in her portraits and in her writings as well, but I feel like a have a ton of reading I need to do first. So I will include a few links at the end of this post if you’re curious as to why she’s such a compelling figure in history.
So what’s in this exhibition? Good question. You’ll find over 100 paintings that span her career (Ottawa Citizen writer Peter Hum described it as “a panoply of the splendorous”), tons of information, and a place to play (a supervised) dress up to learn more about fashion during Marie Antoinette’s time at court… and take a selfie, of course. And no, this part is not just for kids!
Speaking of selfies, I was pleased to see a number of her self-portraits in this exhibition. (Proving that selfies have been around for a long time!) This snippet is from the Wikipedia entry about Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, which I thought was too good not to share here:
“In 1787, she caused a minor public scandal with a self-portrait, exhibited the same year, in which she was shown smiling open-mouthed – in contravention of painting conventions going back to antiquity. The court gossip-sheet Mémoires secrets commented: “An affectation which artists, art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning, and which finds no precedent among the Ancients, is that in smiling, [Madame Vigée-Lebrun] shows her teeth.”
Although she isn’t showing her pearly whites in the picture below, (which was probably rare during a time when dental care was non-existent) her self-portraits certainly are charming:
One of the paintings featured at the gallery is a life-size portrait of Marie Antoinette and her children, which is rarely seen outside France:
“Commissioned in 1785, it was the most important assignment of Vigée Le Brun’s career, intended to restore the image of the increasingly unpopular queen by celebrating her role as mother and guarantor of dynastic continuity. Full of references to religious and history painting, this monumental work captures the sitters in all their majesty. Some ten years later, only one would still be alive.” – gallery.ca
This is one of her portraits of Marie Antoinette in court dress:
We rented an audio tour for this exhibition and I was so glad we did. It kept me focused and added a lot of value to our visit. The audio tours are a very effective way of absorbing a lot of info in an easy way.
Don’t miss The White Dress while you’re there. It’s a different (and smaller) exhibition on the second floor. Did you know Marie Antoinette caused a scandal when she wore muslin?
Our afternoon gave us a great little window on a truly fascinating period of history. Now I need to learn more about her.
Here’s some extra reading:
