Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

The artist's estate;

Caroline de Rivière (1793-1807);

Private collection.

Paris, Grand Palais, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 2015, cat. no. 157.

N. Jeffares, "Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun," Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, London 2006, online edition [http://www.pastellists.com/Articles/VigeeLeBrun.pdf], accessed 31 May 2023, cat. no. J.76.574, reproduced.

Among the most celebrated European portrait, history and landscape painters, pastellists and draftsmen fully engaged in artistic endeavors between the third quarter of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was one of the most widely travelled. While at the peak of her career, both in courtly circles and among the financially privileged and creative social orders, her fame was such that she was one of the few women artists admitted to the Academies of Paris, San Luca and Arcadia in Rome, of Bologna, Parma, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Rouen, Geneva and Avignon. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 had caused her to flee France with her young daughter. She remained absent from her native land over a period of twelve years, during which time she obtained well-paid commissions that allowed her to replenish the fortune she lost time and again.

Mme Le Brun was finally able to return to France in January 1802. Between 1803 and 1806 she travelled in Great Britain and twice in 1807 and 1808 to the Alpine regions of Savoy and Switzerland. Although it was arguably the latter country, with its grandiose landscapes of mountain ranges, glaciers, waterfalls, lakes, snow-capped peaks and climatic and atmospheric phenomena that most clearly inspired her. In the third volume of her Souvenirs, she noted that she executed more than a hundred landscapes: “Près de cent paysage suisses au pastel, faits dans mes deux voyages” (“About one hundred Swiss landscapes in pastel, done during my two trips”).¹ 

Mme Le Brun’s passion for landscape painting and drawing continued unabated into the 1830s. This interest is documented by the eight landscapes offered in this sale, four of which can be securely dated 1821 and 1826 based on annotations made by Vigée Le Brun herself on some of the protective cardboard backings.

Works of this sort have appeared at auction in recent decades, such as View of Lake Lucerne and Stansstad² and An Alpine Landscape³ the appearance of eight in one sale is unprecedented and provides a unique opportunity to study and admire this less well known but utterly intriguing facet of Vigée Le Brun’s graphic œuvre.

Perhaps due to their surprising modernity, which may have led to misattributions, relatively few of Mme Le Brun’s hundreds pastel and black chalk landscapes have resurfaced. (See Neil Jeffares’ online catalogue: http://www.pastellists.com/Articles/VigeeLeBrun.pdf, pp. 21-23, between nos. J.76.544 and J.76.583.)

The eight landscapes in this sale perfectly capture the timeless quality of her pastel landscapes, which in many ways anticipate the pastel landscape, cloud and beach studies of the Impressionists Eugène Boudin (1824-1898) and Oscar-Claude Monet (1840-1926) rather than those of her contemporaries and the Romantics who favored oil paint or gouache and watercolor for such motifs.  

¹Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Paris, H. Fournier 1835-37, vol. III, p. 354

²Sale of pastels from the estate of the Swiss collector Jacques-Louis Isoz (1949-2015), New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2023, lot 24 ($47,880)

³Sale, London, Sotheby’s, 5 July 2023, lot 35 (£24,130)