Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842) was a French portrait painter. Elisabeth Louise Vigée was born in Paris on April 16, 1755, to Louis Vigée, a painter, and Jeanne Maissin, a hairdresser. She was trained in painting by her father and further encouraged in art by Gabriel-François Doyen (1726-1806), Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), and Joseph Vernet (1714-1789). She married the painter and art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun (often spelled Le Brun) in 1776, and they had a daughter, Julie, in 1780.
In 1778 Vigée-Lebrun (also spelled Vigée Le Brun) painted the first of her at least two dozen portraits of Queen Marie Antoinette. This marked the beginning of her career as a painter of royalty, which she pursued until her death. Her popularity was aided by a contemporary enthusiasm for the concept of equality of the sexes. In 1783 she was elected to membership in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (from 1795 known as the Académie de Beaux-Arts), one of the five French learned societies making up the Institut de France.
At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Vigée-Lebrun fled to Rome with her daughter, not to return to her native country for 12 years. In 1790 she went to Naples, where she painted the queen of Naples, the queen's children, and Lady Emma Hamilton. She then traveled through Austria and Russia, receiving the patronage of Catherine the Great and painting members of the royal families. (Around this time, in 1794, her husband sued for divorce, fearing for his life and property because of his and his wife's royal connections.) Vigée-Lebrun went back to France in 1801. In 1803 she traveled to England, where she painted the Prince of Wales (later King George IV); and in 1805 she returned to Paris, where she painted Napoleon's sister, Caroline Murat. Toward the end of her life, the painter spent much of her time at her country house in Louveciennes, which she purchased in 1809. Vigée-Lebrun died in Paris on March 30, 1842.
Most of the large number of portraits that Vigée-Lebrun painted were of women, and her paintings expressed the beauty expected by the sitters as well as evincing an expert handling of the rendering of their costumes. She wrote her Mémoires in 1835; these were translated into English in 1903 by Lytton Strachey. Among the museums displaying her paintings are the Louvre, Paris; the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection, London; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Portraits of Marie Antoinette and her children are in the Versailles Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, while included in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Tex., are self-portraits (1780 and 1782, respectively).