Julian Barnes has said that “it doesn’t really matter whether an artist has a dull or an interesting life, except for promotional purposes.”
Well, lucky for the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa – this summer, it’s presenting works by an artist whose life and art are equally interesting. A promoter’s dream, in other words. About the only hiccup in the scenario is that the artist, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, is little known in North America even as she is, in the recently voiced opinion of one prominent European historian, “the most gifted French portraitist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.”
Sans doute, visitors to the NGC are going to be given ample evidence (and time) to draw their own conclusions. The exhibition, which opens on Friday for a showcase ending in early September, features close to 90 often-ravishing works by Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842). Among them are four portraits of the artist’s greatest and most famous patron, Marie Antoinette, doomed Queen of France, plus an equal number of self-portraits testifying to Vigée Le Brun’s stature as one of the great beauties of Paris in the years preceding the French Revolution (1789-1799). (The name is pronounced vee-zhay le bra – as in “bran” minus the “n.”)
Almost five years in the preparation, the exhibition – or iterations thereof – already has had acclaimed stints at, first, the Grand Palais in Paris, beginning last September, and, most recently, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The last, running Feb. 9 to May 15, drew more than 165,000 visitors.
The Ottawa stop concludes the tour, touted as the first major Vigée Le Brun retrospective in more than 30 years and boasting loans from the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Uffizi, Versailles, Windsor Castle and private collections. One particular highlight: the presentation of the only Vigée Le Brun in a public collection in Canada, a 1796 portrait of Countess Anna Ivanovna Tolstaya, donated to the NGC last December by an anonymous Canadian.
Yet, as long overdue as this ambitious survey clearly is, Paul Lang admits that it’s going to be a “challenge” for the NGC. The gallery’s deputy director and chief curator, Lang has been advocating for a Vigée Le Brun tour even before he came to Canada in early 2011 from Geneva’s Musée d’art et d’histoire. It’s a challenge, he explained during a recent visit to Toronto, not only because the artist isn’t an instantly bankable name – “Yes, she’s not Monet; she’s not van Gogh” – but because the works being exhibited are, with only two exceptions, portraits. And mostly female portraits at that. Audiences, in other words, may fear a sameness – that “it will read,” he said, “like a who’s who of the rich and famous, as something superficial and monotonous.”
A spectre of sorts also haunts the exhibition, namely the NGC’s 2014 survey of illustrations, paintings and sculpture by another French master, Gustave Doré. Like Vigée Le Brun, Doré was very famous during his lifetime (1832-1883), but by the 21st century he was little known, at least by name, especially to North Americans. Still, hopes were high that the brilliance of the oeuvre would prove irresistible. While this was the case at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where its presentation of the retrospective drew 440,000 visitors, the excitement failed to transfer to Ottawa: During its three-month stay at the NGC, the Doré drew fewer than 50,000 spectators.
Lang, 57, still winces at the memory of the Doré failure, but he is convinced that the Vigée Le Brun “rehabilitation,” as he calls it, will be a much better performer. The NGC is putting a lot of marketing muscle into the shows, including TV ads, billboards and bus boards as well as tie-ins with Napoleon and Paris, an exhibition running June 16 through Jan. 8, 2017, at the Canadian Museum of History. Said Lang: “I feel a buzz here that I didn’t with Doré.”
The marketers certainly aren’t lacking for promotable material. There are the paintings, of course – vigorous and vivid, exemplars of bravura technique (check out the hair and satin and velvet), audaciously coloured, the subjects more often than not rendered in poses of such lyrical naturalism that their personalities shine through all the aristocratic frippery and formality.
They’re also often invitations to involvement and close looking, none more so than Vigée Le Brun’s most important commission, a 1787 picture of a pregnant Marie Antoinette and her three young children. Conceived to “resacralize” the Austrian-born monarch in the eyes of a jaundiced French public, the painting is monumental – nine feet tall! – and thick with signifiers (nothing is by accident in a Vigée Le Brun), yet it doesn’t lack for intimacy.
Then there’s the life. A life of resourcefulness (Vigée Le Brun was almost entirely self-taught; her friendship and official portraitist status with Marie Antoinette allowed her, in 1783, to be one of the few women to enter the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture). A life of wealth and fame and danger (she wisely fled France for Italy at the start of French Revolution; “Otherwise,” Lang said, “I’m sure she would have been beheaded as being too close to the Queen and the aristocracy”). A life of exile and travel (to Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Russia, where she lived for almost six years). And one of tragedy – a beloved father who died when she was just 12; an unhappy marriage; a daughter who married, at 20, a feckless Russian, later contracted syphilis, was a prostitute and died at 39; a brother felled by alcoholism.
After 12 years in exile, Vigée Le Brun did return home, but it was a drastically changed France and she never recovered her pre-revolutionary equilibrium or cachet. While she continued to paint, her style and sensibility stayed largely the same at a time when Delacroix and Friedrich, Géricault and Turner were busy overthrowing the neoclassicism she favoured.
Vigée Le Brun went on to live 40 more years upon her return to France – but Lang, tellingly, is including only a couple of fistfuls of paintings from that span in the exhibition’s final section, titled Swan Song. By contrast, the show’s two other sections, the opener, Ancien Régime, and Exile Years, take in just 24 years but include nearly 90 per cent of its contents.
Feminists, or at least a certain kind of feminist such as Simone de Beauvoir, once were harsh toward Vigée Le Brun. “She didn’t behave like a victim,” Lang said. She was “a woman identified with the upper class, empowering people who already had power.” In addition, she unashamedly used what once were called “feminine wiles” – beauty, charm, social skills, attractive clothing, the coquettish gesture – to get ahead.
Today, however, Vigée Le Brun is regarded much more charitably, even approvingly, as a woman of undeniable artistic talent who overcame one obstacle after another to succeed in a man’s, man’s, man’s man’s world. And while she lived among and painted her epoch’s 1 per cent, she made that living mostly by painting her fellow women, even sometimes going so far as to brush (in) their teeth – a clear but audacious violation of the standard of the day that deemed such representations as affectation and abomination.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun is at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, June 10 through Sept. 11. gallery.ca.