Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Self Portrait in a Straw Hat

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, c 1782, oil on canvas, National Gallery London

A recent rave review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian of London’s National Gallery rehang  references this striking artwork and reminded me that Le Brun had been inspired to paint it by her own viewing of Peter Paul Rubens’ Portrait of Susanna Lunden when visiting Antwerp, a work which also hangs in the same space in the National in acknowledgement of the connection between them. In her memoirs, Le Brun specifically drew attention to the lighting effects deployed by the Flemish master, and the deep impression it had made on her.

Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Susanna Lunden, c 1622/25, oil on oak wood, National Gallery, London

The effect of the shadow cast diagonally by the hat in her self-portrait is to somehow dramatize Le Brun’s presence and to animate the directness and self-composure of her gaze; it’s as if the shadow functions as a visual metaphor for the more complex light and shade that exists within a character whose guileless look is so superficially open, ingenuous and candid. It suggests that there are more interesting things going on beneath the adumbration or as if the artist is saying ‘there is more to me than meets the eye’.

Le Brun’s life story would be the stuff of a rollicking biopic, full of reversals of fortune, and although she makes a passing appearance as a character in the recent BBC drama Marie Antoinette as that queen’s portraitist, the events of her life are almost as eventful and drama-worthy as the woman’s she painted, even if their endings were very different. As the daughter of a minor yet established artist, Louis Vigée, and married at age twenty to another an art dealer, Jean-Baptiste Le Brun (by whom she had her own daughter), she enjoyed an early entrée into their milieu in which she seemed entirely at home. She soon found the favour of the queen (they were the same age which I imagine must have helped) and painted several portraits of her. Marie Antoinette’s patronage ensured her acceptance at the Academy and to the Salon at which she presented her Straw Hat work among others.

However, as the Revolution unfolded from 1789 onwards, her privileged position at court which had once been such an advantage soon became a dangerous liability under the prevailing volatile circumstances. Knowing that she would be perceived as an unashamed royalist, she fled France and so began a peripatetic existence, taking in Turin, Rome and Naples where she painted another infamous figure, Lady Hamilton. Her other sitters were often erstwhile adherents of the ancien régime who had fled the threat of the guillotine, living their lives as impoverished aristo émigrés. There followed stints in Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, St Petersburg and London before finally returning to Paris. She died there in 1842 at age 87, having worked prolifically for most of her long and eventful life.

She was a neglected figure for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seen as a reactionary rather than a progressive force and only more recently have feminist scholars helped reevaluate her achievements – she is now quite rightly seen as an artist gifted with astonishing talent and determination who battled entrenched male, institutional chauvinism to create works which speak with bravura vitality and feeling, notwithstanding the politics or the status of her sitters. She has now achieved the artistic recognition she deserves.

The Straw Hat painting was made around 1782 when she was in her mid-twenties and it signals a loose and youthful informality in attitude and dress, a long way from the stiff formality of much eighteenth-century portraiture. The painting places as much emphasis on fashion, from the feather and flowers in the hat to the dress and shawl, as it does to the palette and brushes, the means by which the artist expresses her talent and forges herself a career. The Rubens association is deliberate and more than mere hommage – she is not shy, and why should she be with her talent, at bracketing her achievements with his.

The eponymous straw hat, with its seemingly casual and natural flower decoration together with the looseness of the subject’s coiffure (the antithesis of the eighteenth-century towering and powdered wig) gives the impression of Rousseau-inspired simplicity, a pre-civilised arcadian artlessness while the sky and clouds in the background helps to underscore the sense of pastoral innocence. But there is nothing so artful as artlessness and Le Brun’s hat feather, satin dress and drop earrings make this self-portrait a sophisticated fashion statement par excellence. Her carmine-red lips, slightly parted to reveal her white teeth, and her blushed cheeks, might suggest the colour of outdoorsiness but have been carefully and flatteringly rendered. As Mary D. Sherif has convincingly argued, this self-portrait presents Le Brun dualistically as both a desirable woman and as an engaged artist and neither representation, the artist seems to suggest, should deny the legitimacy of the other.

At the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, accurately described on its website as ‘the jewel in the crown of the University of Birmingham’, (but temporarily closed for refurbishment until 2026), there hangs another of Le Brun’s most compelling portraits; one which alone justifies seeking out this small but globally important art collection and one with which I am most familiar - I’ve looked at it many times and find it mesmerizing. It depicts the Countess Varvara Nikolayevna Golovina whom Le Brun befriended while staying in Russia and who enjoyed a position in the court of Catherine II.

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun , Portrait of Countess Golovina, c 1797/1800, Oil on canvas, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham

I think that the bond between the two women, as recorded in their respective written accounts of it, their mutual admiration, is clearly given expression in the depiction. Again, the gaze is direct, square on, but the kindness and warmth of the smile, the twinkling affection reflected in the eyes is something special – these women, you feel, really liked and valued each other. Varvara was a vivacious lover of art and literature and something of her own artistic free spiritedness is captured here, from the vividly crimson colour of her bohemian (you might say Byronic) gold cuff-embroidered attire to her hair curls tumbling to her shoulder, only loosely tied up with a satin tie in a way that alludes to the orientalism of a turban, this painting is the manifestation of the late eighteenth century idea of sensibility, the capacity for deep emotional feeling; it conveys a sense of tenderness, compassion and the subject’s zest for life. The way that her arm is held up in front of her body, for warmth or self-comfort, gathering her shawl and clutching it to her throat, not only allows the artist to indulge in the portrayal of the rich folds whose materiality we can almost feel, but such a pose is also so suggestive of a hug that it seems to include the viewer in its warm embrace.

In both Straw Hat and Golovina, we are given portraits of rare immediacy, by an ambitious and gifted artist determined to present us with pictures of women that seem to be unmediated by patriarchal norms or expectations. Her accomplishments were such that contemporary critics couldn’t bring themselves to believe that a mere woman could be capable of their execution. The Revolution failed to deliver any relief from such societal misogyny, and it is to Le Brun’s credit that her work triumphed against these odds.