A original exhibition of the French artist’s work reveal her flattering portraiture of Marie-Antoinette,but she also helped reshape the rules of representationiThey called her a spendthrift, a spy, and a sexual deviant; they said she bathed in blood. But in the portraits painted by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun in the 1780s,the last queen of France appears warm, complex, and even demure (quiet, modest, reserved) – someone who deserved better than the toxic slurs of Versailles’s anonymous pamphleteers. In the early days of Marie-Antoinette’s reign,Vigée Le Brun painted the queen with oodles of white silk and grand Hapsburg rigidity, but later the artist depicted her softly, and modestly,with a single cabbage rose in her dainty hand. Another shows her in a simple white dress and straw hat – an extreme informality that led to the portray’s withdrawal from the salon.
How calm she looks, how unruffled by history. Within a decade she would be carted through Paris to the Place de la Révolution, and where her head would close up in a bucket. The queen never saw it coming. whether the artist did,she was paid not to let on.
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Source: theguardian.com