The Sweetness of Life - A Biography of Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun

About this book

"Born in 1755, the daughter of a portraitist and a former hairdresser, Vigee Le Brun triumphed over institutional prejudice to make a career as Marie-Antoinette's favourite portraitist and the painter-confidante of royalty all over Europe. Her connections in Parisian high society made the revolution dangerous for her, and after the fall of the Bastille she fled France both to save her own skin and to go on painting beautiful women and powerful men. Her wandering, cosmopolitan life took her to Bourbon Naples, Habsburg Vienna, imperial St Petersburg and Georgian London, and wherever she went she attracted attention for her alluring portraits." "Vigee Le Brun, in both her personal and her public life, was a woman of contradictions. A revolutionary female artist, she was a political reactionary who yearned for what she saw as the lost paradise of France before the revolution. A proud and independent woman, she raised her daughter single-handedly, only tragically to lose her affection." "Angelica Goodden's illuminating account of this extraordinary woman - the first biography of the artist in English for seventy-five years - is also a vivid portrait of an age of society scandal and political turmoil. Drawing on contemporary records and Vigee Le Brun's own fascinating memoirs, Goodden brings to life the remarkable range of friends and acquaintances the artist made through her work, from Catherine the Great and Madame de Stael to Emma Hamilton, whose suggestive portrait won Vigee Le Brun some notoriety. As her art regains favour, this definitive biography is a long-overdue reassessment of this sometimes scandalous, often devious but prodigiously gifted woman."--BOOK JACKET.