During her lifetime, Vigée Le Brun was France’s most famous woman artist, and she was highly aware of how important her self-presentation was to the Parisian art world. In 1787 she submitted to the French Royal Academy’s Salon three portraits of her daughter, Julie, including this one—a tacit nod to the fact that her ability to create encompassed but was not limited to motherhood. Julie is shown both in profile and straight on through the inclusion of a mirror. The deliberately impossible perspective results in a double image that draws on earlier artists’ allegorical figures of Sight and debates about reality versus illusion in painting.
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Title:Julie Le Brun (1780–1819) Looking in a Mirror
Artist:Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, Paris 1755–1842 Paris)
Date:1787
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:28 3/4 × 23 3/8 in. (73 × 59.4 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Bequest of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2019
Object Number:2019.141.23
Vigée Le Brun’s only child, Jeanne Julie Louise Le Brun, was born in 1780. Although mother and daughter would ultimately become estranged, Julie—sometimes called Brunette—appears to have been doted upon as a child. She was painted by her mother throughout her childhood, including double portraits of mother and child embracing, referred to as maternités. This flattering visual record presents an image of Julie as an endearing young girl, with large blue eyes and wavy brown hair.
The picture was among Vigée Le Brun’s submissions to the Salon of 1787, a group that also included the artist’s portrait of Marie Antoinette with her children, the 1786 maternité, and a small canvas of Julie resting her head on an open Bible. The installation of that year’s Salon is recorded in a print, Exposition au Salon du Louvre en 1787 (The Met, 49.50.244) by Pietro Antonio Martini (1738–1797). Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of Marie Antoinette and her children was given a prominent place (to the left of the doorway), and the smaller canvas of Julie holding a mirror hung just alongside.
Shown three-quarter length in the simple, unadorned dress favored by her mother, Julie stands and faces to the left, her head bent down to her only accessory: a simple rectangular mirror, which she holds angled outward, toward the viewer. She is set against a loosely brushed flat background of the type popularized by Jacques-Louis David. The conceit of the mirror allowed the artist to include both profile and frontal view in the same composition, even if the laws of perspective were not precisely followed. Vigée Le Brun’s confidence as a colorist is evident in the bold choice of red for the mirror frame, picking up the rosy highlights of the face and the detailing of the kerchief tied on Julie’s head. The saturated color sets off this picture within a picture, contemplated both by Julie and by the viewer.
An earlier autograph version of the composition exists in a New York private collection. The dimensions of the two are identical, although the earlier version is painted on a wooden support, while The Met's version is on canvas. Several small details have been altered, from the color and design of the mirror’s frame to the style of the girl’s cuff, but the most notable difference between the two is the passage of time. In The Met's canvas, dated 1787, Julie is seven years old. In the undated earlier version, she appears no older than five. A pastel copy of that version by fermier-général and amateur Laurent Grimod de La Reynière (private collection), dated 1786, provides a terminus ante quem for the first version. Jean Philippe Guy Le Gentil, comte de Paroy (1750–1824), a member of the nobility and, like Grimod de La Reynière, an amateur artist, chose the image to reproduce in aquatint, part of a group of wash-manner and crayon-manner prints he exhibited in the Salon of 1787. (Both men held the position of associé honoraire libre at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.)
Julie was only nine when the events of 1789 caused her and her mother to flee France. They set off—along with Julie’s governess—on the public coach for Italy, intending to return when political order was restored. Their exile turned out to be a long one. They stopped at Turin, Parma, and Florence en route to Rome, where they were offered housing at the Académie de France. They also spent extended periods in Vienna and Saint Petersburg, where Vigée Le Brun had no trouble finding wealthy clients. It was in the Russian capital that Julie met Gaétan Bernard Nigris, secretary to the director of the imperial theaters of Saint Petersburg. They married against the wishes of Vigée Le Brun, who had hoped for a more advantageous match for her only child. Although the marriage lasted only eight years, the rift between mother and daughter was never mended. Julie, who had inherited her father’s debts, died nearly destitute in Paris in 1819. Vigée Le Brun’s many charming portraits of the young Julie suggest her strong affection for her daughter as a child, and their success and popularity in the public arena of the Salons are evidence of the esteemed place of childhood in Enlightenment society.
[2014; adapted from Stein 2005]
Inscription: Signed and dated 1787 (lower left)
?Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, comte de Vaudreuil, Paris; comtesse de Gaujal (in 1885); [Wildenstein, Paris, until 1913; sold to Féral]; [Jules Féral, Paris, from 1913]; sale, Palais Galliera, Paris, April 6, 1976, no. 43 (as "Fillette se regardant dans un miroir," Attributed to Étienne Jeaurat); [Didier Aaron, Paris, 1976, as by Vigée Le Brun, sold to Bardin]; Jean-Paul Bardin, Paris (sold to Aaron); [Didier Aaron, Paris, until 1986; sold to Wrightsman]; Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, New York (1986–d. 2019; cat., 2005, no. 68)
Paris. Salon. August 25–?September 25, 1787, no. 107 (as "Mlle. le Brun, tenant un miroir").
Paris. Musée du Louvre. "Tableaux, statues et objets d'art au profit de l'œuvre des orphelins d'Alsace-Lorraine," 1885, no. 301 (as "Fillette se regardant dans un miroir," lent by Mme la comtesse de Gaujal).
THIS WORK MAY NOT BE LENT, BY TERMS OF ITS ACQUISITION BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.
Critès. La plume du coq de Micille, ou aventures de Critès au sallon. 1787, p. 13 [Collection Deloynes, vol. 15, no. 382, p. 483; McWilliam 1991, no. 0440], suggests that the portrait seen in the mirror should be more mysterious.
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. Souvenirs. Vol. 1, Paris, 1835, p. 334, under the year 1787, lists two versions of "Ma fille, de profil et de face dans un miroir".
Pierre de Nolhac. Madame Vigée-Le Brun, peintre de la reine Marie-Antoinette, 1755–1842. Paris, 1908, pp. 73–74, 152, notes that it has been etched by the comte de Paroy.
W. H. Helm. Vigée-Lebrun, 1755–1842: Her Life, Works, and Friendships. London, 1915, ill. opp. p. 60, as in the collection of M. Féral.
André Blum. Madame Vigée-Lebrun, peintre des grandes dames du XVIIIe siècle. Paris, [1919], p. 98, ill. opp. p. 96 (cropped), as in the collection of M. Féral.
Joseph Baillio. Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 1755–1842. Exh. cat., Kimbell Art Museum. Fort Worth, 1982, pp. 74–75, under no. 25, notes that the artist has taken some liberties with the laws of perspective; suggests that the composition may be based on Ribera's "Philosopher Holding a Mirror" (location unknown).
Joseph Baillio. "Vigée Le Brun and the Classical Practice of Imitation." Paris: Center of Artistic Enlightenment. Ed. George Mauner et al. University Park, Pa., 1988, p. 98, fig. 4-10.
Paula Rea Radisich. "'Que peut définir les femmes?': Vigée-Lebrun's Portraits of an Artist." Eighteenth-Century Studies 25 (Summer 1992), p. 451 n. 21.
Angela Rosenthal. "Infant Academies and the Childhood of Art: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's 'Julie with a Mirror'." Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (Summer 2004), pp. 607–8, 612, 616–25 nn. 4, 6, p. 627 nn. 25, 26, 29, mistakenly illustrates the other version (fig. 2).
Perrin Stein inThe Wrightsman Pictures. Ed. Everett Fahy. New York, 2005, pp. 248–51, no. 68, ill. (color), dates the other version of the composition about 1785 based on the apparent age of the sitter; states that Joseph Baillio proposed (verbally, 2004) that the picture may have been in the collection of Joseph-Hyacinthe-François de Paule de Rigaud, comte de Vaudreuil (1740–1817), citing the existence of a miniature version of the painting by Jacques Thouron (Musée de l'Horlogerie et de l'Émaillerie, Geneva) and noting that other paintings in Vaudreuil's collection were copied in miniature by Thouron.
Xavier Salmon inÉlisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. Ed. Joseph Baillio and Xavier Salmon. Exh. cat., Grand Palais, Galeries nationales. Paris, 2015, p. 194, under no. 71, leaves open the question of which version was included in the 1787 Salon.
Xavier Salmon inVigée Le Brun. Ed. Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer, and Paul Lang. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2016, p. 128, under no. 35, fig. 36 (color) [English and French language Canadian eds., "Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun," Ottawa, 2016].
Hakim Bishara. "A Glorious Gift of European Artworks Is on Display at the Metropolitan Museum." Hyperallergic. November 19, 2019, ill. (color, installation view) [https://hyperallergic.com/528444/a-glorious-gift-of-european-artworks-is-on-display-at-the-metropolitan-museum/].
Holland Cotter. "The Met Casts New Light on Hit Works and History." New York Times (December 25, 2020), p. C1 [online ed., "The Met Casts New Light on its Greatest Hits and History," December 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/arts/design/metropolitan-museum-european-paintings-skylights.html].
Colin B. Bailey. "Review of Baetjer 2019." Burlington Magazine 163 (May 2021), p. 470.
Linda Wolk-Simon. "In a New Light." Apollo 193 (March 2021), p. 75, fig. 3 (color, installation view).
David Pullins, Dorothy Mahon, and Silvia A. Centeno. "The Lavoisiers by David: Technical Findings on Portraiture at the Brink of Revolution." Burlington Magazine 163 (September 2021), p. 787.
Joana Vitkutė. "'Guide me so that I can imitate you': Revisiting the Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s 'Julie Le Brun Looking in the Mirror'." International Journal of Arts, Humanities, & Social Science 3 (January 2022), pp. 68–79, fig. 1 (color), notes the influence of Enlightenment ideas of childhood.
Carole Blumenfeld. "Je déclare vivre de mon art": Dans l'atelier de Marie-Victore Lemoine, Marie-Elisabeth Lemoine, Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet, Marie-Denise Villers. Exh. cat., Musée Fragonard, Grasse. Montreuil, 2023, fig. 74 (color), erroneously as in a private collection.
A second version of the composition, with the same dimensions but on wood, is in a private collection, New York.
There is a copy in miniature by Jacques Thouron (Swiss, 1740–1789) in the Musée de l'Horlogerie et de l'Émaillerie, Geneva (enamel on copper, 2 5/8 x 2 1/4 in., inv. AD 1217).
Etched by Jean Philippe Guy Le Gentil, comte de Paroy (Salon, 1787), and by Horbon.
This work may not be lent, by terms of its acquisition by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, Paris 1755–1842 Paris)
1793
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