The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun [Hardcover]

Angelica Goodden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1999

The Sweetness of Life is an account of the l ife and times of Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, a female ar tist who triumphed over male prejudice to become the favouri te portraitist of Marie-Antoinette. '

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This jargon-free but complex narration follows the tale of the most internationally prominent (and peripatetic) woman portrait painter of her time, Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun (1755-1842). Goodden (French, Oxford Univ.), author of works on French drama and literature, stands carefully aside as the lengthy story of Le Brun's life and career unfolds. Prodigious research culled from far-flung original documents records personality after personality who crossed Le Brun's path as portrait subject, friend, or rival. Family members, confidantes, heads of state, glamorous society luminaries, and geniuses of the arts are all trotted out for good reason, just as today there exists an ancien regime room for Le Brun's work at the Louvre. Highly recommended as more useful than Memoirs of Madame Vigee Le Brun (LJ 5/89), this should be read in conjunction with Mary Sheriff's The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Univ. of Chicago, 1996).?Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A scholarly, illuminating biography of one of the 18th century's most successful female portraitists. Although her paintings appear in museums the world over, critics and historians have often given Vige Le Brun short shrift, faulting her for the complaisant quality of her art. Here Goodden, a fellow in French at Oxford University, duly notes this tendency but also makes plain the aesthetic and economic constraints within which the artist had to work. For although she was the daughter of a minor portrait painter and precociously talented as a child, Vige Le Brun was denied any formal art training on the basis of her sex. ``Such institutional prejudice mattered insamuch as life drawing was the basis of historical painting, the highest genre in the pictorial hierarchy, and one to which ambitious women aspired,'' notes Goodden. And so, from the time she first set up her own studiowhen she was just an adolescentVige Le Brun became a painter of portraits, primarily those of French royalty, power brokers, courtiers, and courtesans. For better or worse, she also gained unparalleled access to the royal court and became the chosen portraitist of Marie-Antoinette. Fortunately, her close affiliation with the queen did not doom her to suffer the same grisly fate; she fled Paris in disguise even as the royal family was being forcibly removed from Versailles. Although Le Brun continued to earn a handsome living from the royal migrs who scattered throughout Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, the world she had known disintegrated, and with it her hopes of becoming a painter of history. What she did, though, she did exceptionally well and earned her place as one of only a handful of women admitted to the Acadmie Royale in Paris. Without overemphasizing the rarity of her subject, Goodden balances Vige Le Brun's personal adventurousness and her political conservatism with cool objectivity. (8 pages color, 16 pages b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Andre Deutsch (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0233990216
• ISBN-13: 978-0233990217
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #889,195 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)