Marie Antoinette and The ‘smile Scandal’
On 7 August 1775 she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a painter and art dealer. (Her husband's great-uncle was Charles Le Brun, first Director of the French Academy under Louis XIV.) Vigée-Le Brun 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. So pleased was the queen that during a period of six years, Vigée Le Brun would paint more than thirty portraits of the queen and her family, leading to her being commonly viewed as the official portraitist of Marie Antoinette. Whilst of benefit during the reign of the Bourbon royals, this label was to prove problematic later.
On 12 February 1780, Vigée-Le Brun gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne Julie Louise, whom she called "Julie".
In 1781 she and her husband toured Flanders and the Netherlands where seeing the works of the Flemish masters inspired her to try new techniques. There, she painted portraits of some of the nobility, including the Prince of Nassau.
On 31 May 1783, Vigée-Le Brun was accepted as a member of France's Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. She submitted numerous portraits along with an allegorical history painting which she considered her morceau de réception—La Paix qui ramène l'Abondance (Peace Bringing Back Prosperity). The Academy did not place her work within an academic category of type of painting—either history or portraiture.
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard also was admitted on the same day. The admission of Vigée Le Brun was opposed on the grounds that her husband was an art dealer, but eventually they were overruled by an order from Louis XVI because Marie Antoinette put considerable pressure on her husband on behalf of her portraitist.
In 1787, she caused a minor public scandal with a self-portrait, exhibited the same year, in which she was shown smiling open-mouthed – in contravention of painting conventions going back to antiquity. The court gossip-sheet Mémoires secrets commented: ‘An affectation which artists, art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning, and which finds no precedent among the Ancients, is that in smiling, shows her teeth.’
In 1789, she was succeeded as court painter to Marie Antoinette by Alexander Kucharsky.
Read more about this topic: Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
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“It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)