When her mother became a widow, she married again, but Vigée Lebrun’s relationship with her stepfather wasn’t very satisfactory, and to remedy this dissatisfaction, her mother encouraged her to continue painting, which led the young artist to having her own studio at the age of 15, from which time she began to be paid for her trade as a portraitist. The first classes of painting and drawing were received from her father and, later, from other outstanding masters of the time.
She was the daughter of a prominent French portrait painter, a profession that allowed the Vigée family to be admitted into bourgeois artistic society. In addition to her talent and virtuosity as a painter, Vigée Lebrun added other factors that contributed to her fortunate life as an artist. In the same way, she knew how to combine her role as an artist and mother very well, without both roles being affected by each other. Vigée Lebrun was very feminine, beautiful, and elegant, as can be seen in her self-portraits (1). In relation to her profession, the artist said: “Actually, it is to this divine passion that I owe not only my fortune, but also my happiness, because it has always been the means to meet the most charming and distinguished men and women in Europe.” By the way, she was able to do this in an artistic environment dominated by men without becoming masculinized or prostituting herself, as some detractors wanted to make out. As she tells in her memoirs, her childhood was the symbol of her entire life, because her taste for painting was manifested from her childhood, when she demonstrated it by drawing and painting, an innate passion for art. Vigée Lebrun was a very talented and privileged woman artist. Marie Louise Vigée Lebrun was a French artist born in 1755 and died in 1842, who devoted herself to painting, a discipline from which she cultivated the genre of portraiture, very common among Rococo painters, an artistic style of the sophisticated aristocratic society of the last stage of the old French regime, in which the characters are represented with great elegance in the context of palace life.
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