MADAME VIGÉE LE BRUN AND HER DAUGHTER.
AFTER THE PAINTING IN THE LOUVRE,
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAUN, CLÉMENT & CO., PARIS
Madame Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Painter
1755-1842
Mlle. Lescot, wife of Haudebourt, the architect, and pupil of Lethière—mischievous tongues, of course, declared that he painted her pictures—was a strange creature, who, at the start, owed the popularity she obtained as much to her personal charm as to her real talent. Her first success was in the drawing-room, where people admired her dances. "She was," says a writer, "ugly and captivating, with crooked eyes and a charming expression, her mouth ill-shaped, but tender and inviting," such as Ingres represented her in one of his finest pencil drawings.
Hitherto, women had certainly banished themselves into the domain of portrait or still-life painting, that is to say, they had done little that was not sheer copying. But, little by little, under the influence of the lesser Dutch masters, who had been passionately appreciated since the close of the previous reign, and thanks to the opening of the Royal Collections at the Luxembourg Palace, where they could be studied and copied, the women-painters, following the example of the masters who gained inspiration therefrom, began to devote themselves to landscape and to genre. They sought out little touching subjects, which very frequently bordered on the ridiculous. For example, "the child's bed catches fire through the carelessness of the nurse who has fallen asleep, and the dog attempts to waken her."
Mlle. Lescot cut herself adrift from all these insipidities. The opportunity came for her to spend several years in Rome. She was struck by the popular customs of the country, by its colour and that singular and picturesque charm which Granet had been the first to discover—the charm which, after her own time, was to be made further known by the paintings of the well-known Léopold Robert. As a matter of fact, she was practically the creator of the type of exotic subjects borrowed from Italy, to which numerous artists in France devoted themselves—Hébert, Bonnat and Jules Lefebvre, to name but a few of the most important of them. In choosing her motifs she displayed wit and inventiveness, and at times a delicate grace, notably in her first pictures, before the desire to satisfy a daily increasing connection had driven her into unduly hurried work. Her technique, too, was brisk, yet careful, as it should be in small works such as hers. Her lightly-touched lithographs, together with those which she did "after" her own pictures, contributed to popularise her special subjects and her name.
The novelty of these paintings, devoted to the cult of "local colour," caused them to be adopted as "romantic." It was the same with Schnetz and Léopold Robert, who shared the popularity. But the real "Young romantic" among artists was Mlle. de Fauveau. What one discovers with regard to her is that she is not a painter but a sculptor. The Royal Academy of the 17th century had already boasted certain wood carvings by la demoiselle Massé. Also, there was Mme. Falconet. But the great and austere art was cultivated only as a rare exception by woman. Mlle. Félicie de Fauveau was the first pre-Raphaelite, although the return to the primitive Italian masters of the 16th century dates further back, but with cropped head under a velvet toque, after the style of Raphael himself, she unceasingly uttered curses against that noble personality, whose brush produced the highest incarnation of the art of painting.
But the naturalist movement it was that witnessed the development of the greatest artistic personality in the feminine world of to-day—Rosa Bonheur. The rôle played by Rosa Bonheur is important from the feminine point of view, for the reason that she broke away from ancient traditions. She revealed what woman was capable of in the matter of energy, of continuity of purpose, of method, of scientific direction, in a word, in the indispensable impetus of inspiration. Before her day, the woman-painter had always been looked upon rather as a phenomenon, or her place in the domain of art was conceded to her on the grounds that she was indulging in an elevating and tasteful pastime, coming under the category of "accomplishments." Rosa Bonheur gave to woman a position equal to that of man. She won for herself unanimous admiration, based, not on the singularity of her life, not on looseness of morals, not on social triumphs, not on friends at Court, but on her robust, virile, observant and well-considered talent, which in its turn was based on a primary study of anatomy and osteology, developed by a continuous observation of the constitution and the life of the animal world. Her long life was crowned with glory. She held an exceptional place in art, akin to that of George Sand in the world of letters.
From that day forth, there appeared a new phase in the artistic life of woman. Art became for her, not merely an intellectual pastime, but a vocation and a career. Rosa Bonheur lived nearly to the close of the nineteenth century, seeing many revolutions both in French life and in French art, but remaining always quite true to herself. Perhaps the most uncertain period of all, historically, so far as women were concerned, was that period of wave-like fluctuation in French art that occurred in the seventies and eighties, reflecting itself in the work of such women painters as Angèle Dubos, Jeanne Fichel, Marie Petiet, Laure de Chatillon, Félicie Schneider, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Nicolas, and Rosa Bonheur's successor—her heiress, so to speak—Madame Virginie Demont-Breton, the daughter, wife and niece of a family of distinguished artists. She has achieved a well-deserved popularity with her subjects of popular and rustic life, and, like Rosa Bonheur, has attained the rank of officer of the Legion of Honour. Two other feminine personalities have attracted the attention of both public and artists, the one, the sister-in-law of Manet, the delightful Mademoiselle Morisot, who has, so to speak, improved on the refinement of her master; the other, that strange and alluring young Russian girl, who adopted France as her Fatherland, and whom France adopted as artist. Marie Bashkirtseff, struck down by a cruel and premature death, at the age of twenty-three, revealed something far more than mere happy gifts. One is surprised at the amount of studies produced by the unfortunate and beautiful creature in the short space allotted to her for her life-work.