1: Vigee Le Brun at Versailles
Louise Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun
Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine-Habsbourg, Queen of France, and Her Children, 1787Oil on canvas, w195 cm x h271 cm (76.77" x 106.69")
Palace of Versailles, Versailles, France
Spent some time last week looking at ways art can 'speak truth to power', but throughout history portraiture has mostly been used for the opposite effect. (No wonder, since the rich and powerful were usually the only ones who could afford monster-size handpaintings of their own faces.)
So today, a portrait by the 'official' portrait artist of Marie Antoinette, Vigee Le Brun. You can read a bit more about this one here, but the upshot: during a time of intense protest and bad feeling against the French monarchy and against Marie-Antoinette personally, this portrait was meant as a bit of political propaganda, a formal portrayal of the Queen with hopefully-sympathetic emphasis on her motherhood1 (along with the usual implications that she is also the 'mother' of her country). Didn't work out too well of course — the royal family would be arrested within two years of this painting's completion, Marie executed within six.
But because the stakes were so unusually high, this is a good painting to look at to see how *considered* everything often had to be in portraits to convey the intended meaning. For one thing, you can just feel the stiffness coming from the need to mass-communicate (this painting is far less relaxed than many of Vigee Le Brun's own previous portrayals of the queen). And from the colors/fabrics worn to the positions of the family members relative to each other and to the audience (especially where the gazes are directed and the position of the hands), from the size of the painting to the careful level of formality (enough richness to befit the position, but austerity throughout most of the picture to put no emphasis on riches), everything in a formal portrait has to be thought about. You can imagine yourself as a French noble or subject seeing this piece, viewing it through a lens of sympathy or disgust; try flipping the lens back and forth, and see how different aspects take on different meanings.
There's also a follow-up point here that is true for most art, but comes through really sharply in portraiture: there's no such thing as art meant for 'everybody'. There is always an intended audience, and that audience may be as large as millions, as small as one person2, or as targeted as the certain number of nobles needed to keep up a functioning government.
NOTES:
1. Extra sympathy points: her youngest child died during the time this portrait was being painted, and it was brought to completion anyway with the bassinet left empty. This wasn't necessarily the normal or obvious solution; typically, it seems that such situations for royal/wealthy portraits were handled by re-composing and painting over affected sections. But I don't actually think Marie-Antoinette/Vigee Le Brun were trying to callously exploit the death of Marie's child — just the opposite. My speculation would be that the public aggression against the queen had reached such a point that this was more of a desperate cry for recognition that at the center of the hatred was a human.
2. For what it's worth, that's the way I approach most of my own portrait commissions — as "artwork for an audience of one" (one person or one family, as the case may be). And even within that, knowing specifically who a work is (spouse? grandparent? friend?) for can have a surprising effect on the finished piece, because the emotion you're trying to emphasize gets tilted depending on the relationship.
So today, a portrait by the 'official' portrait artist of Marie Antoinette, Vigee Le Brun. You can read a bit more about this one here, but the upshot: during a time of intense protest and bad feeling against the French monarchy and against Marie-Antoinette personally, this portrait was meant as a bit of political propaganda, a formal portrayal of the Queen with hopefully-sympathetic emphasis on her motherhood1 (along with the usual implications that she is also the 'mother' of her country). Didn't work out too well of course — the royal family would be arrested within two years of this painting's completion, Marie executed within six.
But because the stakes were so unusually high, this is a good painting to look at to see how *considered* everything often had to be in portraits to convey the intended meaning. For one thing, you can just feel the stiffness coming from the need to mass-communicate (this painting is far less relaxed than many of Vigee Le Brun's own previous portrayals of the queen). And from the colors/fabrics worn to the positions of the family members relative to each other and to the audience (especially where the gazes are directed and the position of the hands), from the size of the painting to the careful level of formality (enough richness to befit the position, but austerity throughout most of the picture to put no emphasis on riches), everything in a formal portrait has to be thought about. You can imagine yourself as a French noble or subject seeing this piece, viewing it through a lens of sympathy or disgust; try flipping the lens back and forth, and see how different aspects take on different meanings.
There's also a follow-up point here that is true for most art, but comes through really sharply in portraiture: there's no such thing as art meant for 'everybody'. There is always an intended audience, and that audience may be as large as millions, as small as one person2, or as targeted as the certain number of nobles needed to keep up a functioning government.
NOTES:
1. Extra sympathy points: her youngest child died during the time this portrait was being painted, and it was brought to completion anyway with the bassinet left empty. This wasn't necessarily the normal or obvious solution; typically, it seems that such situations for royal/wealthy portraits were handled by re-composing and painting over affected sections. But I don't actually think Marie-Antoinette/Vigee Le Brun were trying to callously exploit the death of Marie's child — just the opposite. My speculation would be that the public aggression against the queen had reached such a point that this was more of a desperate cry for recognition that at the center of the hatred was a human.
2. For what it's worth, that's the way I approach most of my own portrait commissions — as "artwork for an audience of one" (one person or one family, as the case may be). And even within that, knowing specifically who a work is (spouse? grandparent? friend?) for can have a surprising effect on the finished piece, because the emotion you're trying to emphasize gets tilted depending on the relationship.