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"[...]carried in a basket by a nurse, in order that we might make a long day of it. Mlle. Boquet was fifteen years old and I fourteen. We were rival beauties. I had changed completely and had become good looking. Her artistic abilities were considerable; as for mine, I made such speedy progress that I soon was talked about, and this resulted in my making the gratifying acquaintance of Joseph Vernet. That famous painter gave me cordial encouragement and much invaluable advice. I also got to know the Abbe[...].""

Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was a French painter. Her style is generally considered Rococo and shows interest in the subject of neoclassical painting. By the time she was in her early teens, she was painting portraits professionally. After her studio was seized, for practicing without a license, she applied to the Academie de Saint Luc, which unwillingly exhibited her works in their Salon. In 1783, she was made a member of the Academie. She painted portraits of many of the nobility of the day and as her career blossomed, she was invited to the Palace of Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette. After the arrest of the royal family during the French Revolution Vigee-Lebrun fled France with her young daughter Julie. She lived and worked for some years in Italy, Austria, and Russia. She was welcomed back to France during the reign of Emperor Napoleon I. She visited England at the beginning of the nineteenth century and painted the portrait of several British notables including Lord Byron. She published her memoirs in 1835 and 1837, which provide an interesting view of the training of artists at the end of the period dominated by royal academies.

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ...the arrival of summer. I took a great delight in the walks, and hastened to enjoy the beautiful surroundings of St. Petersburg. I very often went to the Lake of Pergola alone with my Russian manservant to take what I called an air-bath. I enjoyed the contemplation of its limpid water, which vividly reflected the trees on its banks. And then I would mount to the heights adjacent. On one side the horizon was bounded by the sea and I could distinguish the sails lit up by the sun. Here a silence reigned that was disturbed only by the song of a thousand birds, or sometimes by the sound of a distant bell. The pure air and the wild, picturesque place enchanted me. My faithful Peter, who warmed up my little dinner or picked flowers of the field for me, made me think of Robinson on his island with Friday. The heat being considerable, I often went with my daughter for early walks on the island of Krestovski. The extreme point of this island seemed to merge into the sea, on which large vessels were navigating. Sometimes we went there in the evening to see the Russian peasants dance, their national dress being very picturesque. I remember, on the subject of the excessive heat often prevailing at St. Petersburg, a certain day in the month of July of some year in which that month was hotter than in Italy. On this day I saw Princess Dolgoruki's mother, Princess Bariatinski, who was once as lovely as an angel, and whose clever and spontaneous wit rendered her one of the most fascinating women of St. Petersburg, established in her cellar, with her lady's companion seated on the bottom step, very quietly reading to her from a book. But to return to the island of Krestovski. Taking a row in a boat one day, we came upon a crowd of men and women all bathing...

Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favorite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, and one of the few women accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In her role as an artist, she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified as monstrously unfeminine. In the Exceptional Woman, Mary D. Sheriff uses Vigee-Lebrun's career to explore the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional, and medical debates about women in eighteenth-century France. Central to Sheriff's analysis is one key question: given the cultural norms and social attitudes that regulated a woman's activities, how could Vigee-Lebrun conceive of herself as an artist, and indeed become a successful one, in old-regime France. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigee-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women. Engaging ancien-regime philosophy as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vigee-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work of this controversial woman artist.