by Jean-Pierre Cuzin (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Scala, 2003) Memoirs of Madame Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (Gloucester: Dodo, 2008)). Recent years have seen the appearance of feminist studies (Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)), biographies (Angelica Goodden, The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (London: André Deutsch, 1997) Gita May, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) and Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun (Paris: Gallimard, 2015)), and several re-editions of the artist’s Souvenirs ( Mémoires d’une portraitiste, ed. Her eventual rehabilitation is in no small part thanks to Joseph Baillio, who organized the only previous monographic exhibition in Fort Worth in 1982, and painstakingly continued his research, culminating in this magnificent show. Simone de Beauvoir, who might have spearheaded a feminist revival, dismissed her as narcissistic ( Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), ii, 631). In the nineteenth century she was effectively written out of influential histories of art. Although she returned to France in 1802 and lived another four decades, she never adjusted to the radically changed environment. Vigée Le Brun, an unabashed royalist, remained very Ancien Régime in her sensibilities and approach to patronage as she toured the courts of Europe after the Revolution. There are several reasons why this event did not happen sooner. Subsequently the exhibition - slimmed down to a still sizeable ninety works - transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery, Ottawa. The vernissage at this prime venue on the Champs-Élysées was the kind of red-carpet affair that the artist would have enjoyed and felt was her due.
It comprised a vast 150 artworks, many of which were on public view for the first time. The first ever retrospective in France devoted to Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, the prolific and successful portrait-painter, opened at the Grand Palais in September 2015.
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