Souvenirs De Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), a painter whose talent was recognised from the age of fifteen, became Marie-Antoinette's portraitist in 1778. From one court to another, she travelled and practised her profession for a dozen years in Italy, Austria, Russia, Prussia and Saxony before returning to France, then staying in England and Switzerland. At the end of an eventful life which saw the Ancien Régime, the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration, she was invited to write her Souvenirs. Although tested by the Revolution, by slander and various family misfortunes, Élisabeth kept a positive spirit in her writings as well as in her painting: she became attached to the places and people she frequented.

Her testimony reproduced in this book is full of amusing anecdotes and literary portraits reported with finesse and humour. She will have produced a thousand paintings, of which about three hundred are illustrated here.