![]() The latter had long expressed her frustration at being unable to find any painter who could capture her likeness. She had enjoyed the patronage of the Duchesse d’Orléans, a member of the royal family, who introduced her to the Queen. She was the daughter of a renowned artist, Louis Vigée, and had been painting aristocratic portraits since her teenage years. Madame Lebrun, though only twenty-four, the same age as Marie-Antoinette, was already an established portraitist. I had no colours to paint such freshness, such delicate tints, which were hers alone, and which I had never seen in any other woman. Neither could I render the real effect of it as I wished. I never have seen one so brilliant, and brilliant is the word, for her skin was so transparent that it bore no umber in the painting. Her nose was slender and pretty, and her mouth not too large, though her lips were rather thick.But the most remarkable thing about her face was the splendour of her complexion. Her eyes were not large in colour they were almost blue, and they were at the same time merry and kind. Her features were not regular she had inherited that long and narrow oval peculiar to the Austrian nation. To anyone who has not seen the Queen, it is difficult to get an idea of all the graces and nobility combined in her person. She had the best gait of any woman in France, carrying her head erect with a dignity that marked her as the Queen in the midst of her whole Court, her majestic mien, however, not in the least diminishing the sweetness and amiability of her face. Her arms were superb, her hands small and perfectly formed, and her feet charming. Marie-Antoinette was tall and admirably built, being somewhat stout, but not excessively so. It was in the year 1779, she writes, that I painted the Queen for the first time she was then in the heyday of her youth and beauty. ![]() And what better way to do so than return to Madame Lebrun’s Memoirs? All the more reason to look into the relationship between the two ladies. Without Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s many portraits of Marie-Antoinette, our mental image of the Queen would be different, so iconic have these paintings become.
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