Happy Saturday, everybody. It is Elizabeth Louise's birthday. So today's Saturday Classic is our episode on her, which we just missed having ready in time for her birthday when we originally released it. She was born in April sixte and this episode originally came out a month after her birthday. On MA got a couple of points in this episode. We mostly me mentioned getting images of our artwork to use on our website, and if you have not been to our website in a few years, we no longer have episode specific artwork on there, but there's still just a ton of her work available to look at online. It is a quick Google image search away, so we hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and well come to the podcast. I'll try and I'm trade v Wilson. And it hasn't actually happened as of when we are recording, but by the time this episode comes out, we will have recently passed the birthday of a very important French artist and we do not have an episode on her. This is what happens when we have to record like an extra three week buffer of episodes ahead of time. Yeah, time travel, time travel, which is fine. I kind of wish I had thought to do it sooner in the year so we could land this nearer her birthday, but we didn't, uh. And A large part of her appeal as a portrait artist was her ability to paint incredibly flattering likenesses. She brought a lightness to her depictions that gives them great life, and she actually made a good living with her art. Although she always had aspirations of working on sort of grand historical art, she was kept very, very busy by a steady list of commissions, starting when she was merely a teenager and lasting throughout her life. Her works, which captured the likenesses of many royals and nobles of her time, are seen literally throughout the world. So if you google Marie Antoinette, you will undoubtedly see several portraits painted by the subject of today's podcast, Elizabeth Louise Holly is going to say that more beautifully than me consistently throughout this entire episode. No, I'm sure I'm clunking it up in my own magical way. So. Elizabeth Louise Vijay was born in Paris on April sixteenth, seventeen fifty five. Her father, Louis vj was a successful artist who specialized in pastel portraits. Because of her father's work, the Vijay family was afforded some access to intellectual circles and society that otherwise would have been a little closed off to them. As a consequence, even as a child, Elizabeth received lessons and encouragement in her artistic pursuits by some of the most popular artists of the day. Yeah, she really was clearly going to be an artist no matter what. She went to boarding school from the ages of six to eleven, and, as I said, an artist from the beginning. She spent most of her time, they're drawing on just about every scrap of paper she came across. She basically couldn't stop making art. She told one story in her memoirs where she was sent outside and she would draw in the sand and the dirt, portraits and and little sketches while she was just standing there in the yard, because she would rather be painting or drawing than doing anything else. Because she was also a little bit of a frail child, her parents would often take her out of school for a few days at a time, so she could go home and kind of recover, And she apparently loved this because she absolutely adored her family. She loved spending time with them, particularly her father, and she also adored her younger brother, Etienne, who was born three years after her. Once she was permanently removed from boarding school, she was quite happy. But her bliss was pretty short lived. Just a year later, her father became seriously ill and he never recovered. He died when Elizabeth was just twelve, and his last words to Elizabeth and Etienne were be happy my children in and the way her memoirs written, those might have been his last words period, but it's not entirely clear, uh, which is so sad and poignant, heartbreaking, And the death of her father was, as you can imagine, really intense once she was very young too. He had kind of been the center of her universe, uh, and it really halted her interest in art for a little while. She describes herself as being unable to pick up her her pastels for a while. But eventually the French painter Gabrielle Francois Doyen, who had been a good friend of Louis vig urged Elizabeth to return to her passion of drawing and painting as a way of coping with her grief, and this is really when she started working in earnest on portraiture. She also started visiting galleries and museum exhibits with her mother, and she became more fully immersed in studying the masters of painting. She copied their styles and various portraits and studies. While Louis had left no financial Christian for the family when he died, she was able to make a little money with her portrait work. But the money that was coming in really wasn't enough to support Elizabeth, her mother, and her brother, and so her mother remarried to a jeweler. But the young woman Elizabeth continued to take portrait clients, and by the age of fifteen, she had set up a studio and began painting portraits basically as her profession, and she quickly grew a considerable clientele. But the money that she was making at this point went right to her stepfather, a man who she pretty frankly detested. Her clientele continued to grow, a fact that Elizabeth attributed not only to her skill as a painter, but also her own good looks. We have self portraits of her as the artwork on our website for these episodes, and I feel like I can see her kind of saying in my mind, yes, I am quite pretty, not in an arrogant way. She has a matter of fact, she's pretty frank about it her memoirs, and she does sort of paint. It's like, I'm not trying to brag, but people would stare at me in public, like I was pretty because my mother was pretty. Yes, so she would later write, quote, since I have acknowledged that I was stared at in the streets, the same is true of the theaters and other public places, and that I was the object of many attentions, that maybe it may readily be guessed that some admirers of my face gave me commissions to paint theirs. They hoped to get into my good graces this way. And I kind of like though that she, while she was very clear throughout her life that her art was her passion, she almost tries to downplay her own skill by going, oh, some of them just wanted to work with me because I was pretty. Just kind of a weird um yeah, like boast slash humbleness. At the same time, I'm not. I'm really not sure what it is exactly about her portraits that makes me feel like she's going, yes, I am quite pretty. She was quite pretty. She also, though, had this very funny way of diverting the attentions of young men who had hired her, in her opinion, to paint their portraits just so they could be with her. Uh. And so she would pose them in such a way that they would always have to be looking away from her, And whenever she would catch them trying to move their their eyes and gaze at her while she painted, she would then say, I'm doing the eyes now, so that they would have to return to the original position and couldn't look at her. Uh. And she always had her mother present when she was painting clients, and this amused her mother as well. She was made a member of the Painters Guild of the Academy de Saint Luke when she was just nineteen, which significantly expanded her professional network and brought in new clients. Uh. That same year, seventeen seventy four, Elizabeth met Jean Baptiste Pierre Raboin, who was an art dealer as well as an artist, and they were neighbors and Elizabeth was eager to visit his home to see his vast collections of art, and while Elizabeth Vija was not thinking about marriage, she was making her own money. At this point, she really didn't see any to worry about getting married and finding a husband to support her. Her mother really encouraged her towards Lebron romantically, hoping to ensure a secure future for her daughter. They got married two years later. Initially, they didn't announce their marriage because Monsieur Lebrun was skipping out on an engagement to the daughter of a Dutch client. During the time their marriage was secret, Elizabeth received numerous warnings from friends and clients that this man would not make a good husband. He's bits of advice and dried up once the couple went public. Four years into their marriage, they had a daughter, Jean Julie Louise, and Elizabeth adored her baby girl. Yeah. Can you imagine being married to someone on the down low and having people come and go, hey, look, I know you've been kind of serious with this guy. You should not marry him. Yeah, he's kind of a jerk. Uh. He was not a great husband. Um aside from being a cheater and a frequent patron of prostitutes. He, like Elizabeth's stepfather, took all of her earnings from her art, and then he gambled all of that away. But Elizabeth generally described him fairly kindly in her writing, despite his faults. She wrote, quote, his character exhibited a mixture of gentleness and liveliness. He was extremely obliging to everybody, and in a word, quite an agreeable person. But his furious passion for gambling was at the bottom of the ruin of his fortune and my own, of which she had the entire disposal. But while Jean Baptiste was not an ideal as a spouse, his art collection was another matter. She studied the many paintings and prints that he amassed with great fervor. She really loved it, and in seventy two the couple traveled to lepai Ba the Low Countries. So a quick geography aside, just in case you do not know uh that designation. The Low Countries is the name given to the coastal region of northwestern Europe that includes Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium. While traveling in the Low Country, Elizabeth studied another Landish art, the glaze working color palette of Rubens was especially impactful, and it shaped the young woman's arn't going forward from that point, and we're about to get to the moment in her life that really launched career into the stratosphere. But before we do that, we're going to pause for a word from one of our sponsors, which she was only twenty three. J Lebrun was commissioned for an incredibly prestigious task. She was to paint the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. She described the Queen at the time as incredibly lovely. Quote. Marie Antoinette was tall and admirably built, being somewhat stout, but not excessively so. Her arms were superb, her hands small and perfectly formed, and her feet charming. She had the best walk of any woman in France, carrying her head erect with dignity that stamped her queen in the midst of her whole court. Her majestic man, however, not the least diminishing with sweetness and amiability of her face. To anyone who has not seen the Queen, it is difficult to get an idea of all the graces and all the nobility combined in her person. And while Leo was initially afraid of the queen, as I can't imagine anyone wouldn't be kind of nervous doing a portrait for a royalty. Marie Antoinette was apparently very gracious with the painter and the two really became quite friendly. Eventually the pair would sing together while the painter worked once she had heard that Elizabeth was had a fairly good singing voice. They liked to sing together while she sat for portraits, which I find so charming. Uh. And Elizabeth's time and Versailles working on that first portrait of Louis the sixteenth wife really led to great success for the young artist. She became a court artist and was well paid for the position. She was the first woman to ever become an artist to the king, so it was quite significant. And over the course of the ten years from seventeen seventy nine to seventeen eighty nine, Leboin painted thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette. You've probably seen many of them. I would say. One of the most famous ones that immediately comes to mind when I imagine portraits of Marie Antoinette is one of hers. Yeah, I mean several. If you'd like go through your head and go, oh, there's that other portrait of Oh yeah, and there's they're probably most of them are the ones that Leboin painted. They're beautiful. Louis the sixteenth was also a fan of all these portraits, and he once told the painter quote, I know nothing about painting, but you make me like it. I think that's so sweet. I mean, he was a mess in many ways, but I find that quote terribly charming. Becoming one of the queen's favorites definitely had some benefits. In seventeen eighty three, it was Marie Antoinette's influence that finally got the Academy Royal Pol to accept Via Lebois as a member. This professional artist organization of incredible prestige rarely accepted women, and Va Lebron had been trying for years to get in, but her husband's work as an art dealer had been a little bit of a roadblock. It was kind of a sticking point that maybe this was more of a business thing than an art thing. And she was actually only one of four women in the organization when she was admitted, and she was and the fact that she was there was it came with a little bit of a level of resentment on the part of the organization. Basically, they did not appreciate that they had been pressured by the monarchy to accept Via Lebroin. But if you know anything about Marie Antoinette, you know that anyone and everyone associated with her eventually became mired in rumors and accusations as a queen's tendency to attract scandal really radiated to all of her friends. There was gossip that vj Lebron was not actually an artist, but instead that her work was done by a ghost painter, and that she had used sexual prowess to raise her position in court. Throughout all of this, the Vija Lebron painted. She created portraits of many of the more famous figures of the Louis the sixteenth court, including Madame du Berri and the Duchess de Polignac. She had as many as three sittings per day on her schedule, and she worked furiously to keep up with the demand for her work. She really had an incredible work ethic. She worked so hard that she actually became ill. For a time, her digestion suffered. It became quite poor. She was unable to eat, and she lost a great deal of weight. The remedy, according to her doctor, was to go to bed immediately after eating dinner, and that sounds counter to a lot of modern advice. Most people will say, don't go lie down with a heavy meal on your stomach, but the painter really credited this habit was saving her life, as she she really did regain strength and put some weight back on following uh these doctors orders. Vija Lebron was in many ways the toast of the town at this sphase of her career. People came to visit her at her at her home studio often, although she believed some of them were also there to see her husband's art collection, and she often hosted readings by poets and impromptu opera performances. Despite being a favorite of the Queen and part of a very vibrant French social scene, vi Lebrun was not a slave to fashion. She didn't really like the fashion of the day. She found it fussy and sort of ridiculous in many ways, and she often tried to persuade her subjects to abandon their trendy clothing for simpler and more classical drapings when she was painting them. If you look at a lot of these portraits that she did, she does have them kind of draped and just very simple robes, shawls, etcetera. She had to have dresses specially made to go to Versailles for her sittings with Marie Antoinette. She didn't just have fancy clothes on hand. Uh. And she always did her own hair, which I thought was sort of charming as well. She also hated the powdered look of hair. She constantly begged her clients to please sit with their natural hair color and not powder their hair. As the French Revolution heated up and sentiment again the royal court really started to grow. Len eventually fled France for her own safely safety things. It got to the point where her home was targeted. People would shake their fists at her when she left the house, and someone had thrown sulfur into the cellar, which sounds awful. Yeah, I also wonder, and I don't know, Uh, this is purely speculation, but I wonder if that could potentially have damaged any paintings like just the You know, if you think of an oil painting, they take a long time to cure, and I imagine having weird things in the air might do some damage to some of it, but I don't know. That's again just speculation on my part, a question mark if anybody knows, right us and tell us. For a long while, though, resisted her urge to leave France because she didn't want to break the large number of commissions that she had in her queue. She really worked constantly. She always had people on basically a wait list just waiting to be the to have an availability. But in the fall of eight and she was so shaken by some of the violent ends that many of her society acquaintances were meeting that she had in fact decided to leave, and so she packed her carriage and prepared her exit. But the night before she was planning to go, several armed men broke into her room, and they appeared to be inebriated, and they harassed her for a while, but they did eventually leave. Later, two of them came back and told her that they were neighbors and meant her no harm, but that she simply had to go. They further advised her not to take her own carriage but instead to take a stage coach. She took their advice and a week later left on the first stage coach she had been able to book, and so she was moving and with her young daughter to Italy, and when she did so, her French citizenship was revoked. She estimated that in her career up to that point she had earned more than a million francs, but thanks to her husband's gambling, she had almost nothing to her name when she fled. Returning to France was impossible for twelve years, and during that time she traveled to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and eventually Russia, which she really loved and she stayed there for six years. Coming up, we'll get into a bit of detail about some unfortunate events in St. Petersburg, Russia, as well as the painters later life, But first we're going to pause for a very word from a sponsor. So during all of these travels, when she was outside of France, Vi Lebois was painting portraits to earn a living to support herself and her daughter. But this was definitely not a case of an artist scraping by and doing work for pittances. Elizabeth's reputation as an artist was really impressive. She was basically welcomed into all of the houses of rulers and dignitaries throughout any of the areas she traveled in. They were all more than happy to pay the gifted painter to create beautiful portraits of themselves and their families. She lived quite well while he was in exile. During her time away from France, Elizabeth and her husband severed their ties. In seventeen ninety three, Jean Baptiste Pierre Le divorced his wife under duress from revolutionary authorities who labeled Elizabeth as a deserter for having fled the country. And in addition to the portraits which were her bread and butter, uh I just wanted to mention that while she was traveling, she did hundreds, literally hundreds of landscaped pieces during her travel, somewhere in oils and somewhere in Pastel's and those are things that didn't always get a lot of attention from the art world, but they're getting a little bit more, uh interest now. While she loved St. Petersburg, particularly her relationship with her daughter suffered there. Jean Julie Louise had grown into a lovely girl, and, like her mother before her, received a great deal of attention from potential suitors. When Julie as she was called, was seventeen. She fell in love with a man about a dozen years older because they was Degree and he was secretary to account and when visual Lebron got wind of this budding romance, she was first of all heartbroken at the thought of losing her daughter. We spoke when we mentioned her baby girl being born that she was really devoted to her, and that stayed the case throughout her life. She was so devoted to her child. Uh. But then she started to ask around to get information and opinions on Degree, but the things that she was hearing were something of a mixed bag. Some people really loved him and others had really little good to say about him. But more concerning to the mother was really the fact it almost is a repeat of how she got into her marriage with Lebron, uh, is that she was concerned that Negree was not really well positioned. He had an okay job, but he really didn't have like a great job, and Elizabeth advised her daughter against marriage, and it eventually drove a huge wedge between mother and daughter. The couple married, and while Vija Lebrown fulfilled the duties of the bride's family, including giving the couple a sum of money from her recent commissions. She was not a happy mother of the bride. When mother visited her newly wet daughter in the weeks following the wedding, it appeared that Julie wasn't especially happy either, although she was resigned to stay and just as Visa, Lebron was coping with the heartbreak of seeing her only child in what appeared to be an unhappy marriage. Uh the artist's mother died, and the combined stresses and unhappiness of these events really took their toll, and in an effort to escape via change of scenery, Lebron decided to head to Moscow in eighteen o one, as Russia was itself in the midst of political turmoil related to the French Revolution and shifting loyalties via Lebron was once again ill. She continued to suffer both physically and mentally, and then decided to leave Russia and le Bron returned to Paris after making several visits throughout cities in Europe. She kind of took a long, circuitous route home and she was greeted by happy friends and family who were overjoyed to see her once again. Once She did reach Paris, but she really didn't feel at home in the changed city in general. She wrote, Paris has a less lively appearance to me. And seeing the words liberty, fraternity, or death that were scrawled on the walls around the city which had been part of the revolution, really saddened her, and it reminded her of what she what her life had once been, and what she had lost because of her melancholy at being in the city she had once loved so much. The Brown moved to London in eighteen o two. She wasn't entirely enamored with England either. She's found it rather drab and uninspiring, and the damp climate meant that her paintings took a really long time to dry. She didn't find the art community entirely welcoming either, and some of them even printed criticisms of the French school of art and all who came from it. Yeah, she got kind of embroiled in a back and forth with another artist who printed some nasty things quite clearly aimed at her uh and she wrote him a letter in defense of of the French artists that circulated among society. Like everyone knew about this letter, so it was good, not the best welcome in terms of that, although she did have friends there. But shortly after visual leb arrived in London, the treat of the Treaty of Amiens was signed, and as part of that treaty, any French person in England who had been there less than a year was to be sent out of the country. But because Elizabeth did move in illustrious circles, the Prince of Wales was able to secure a special permission from King George the Third that enabled her to stay. She remained in England for almost three years, visiting all of the royal residences and castles. You could possibly imagine. Her memoir just sort of lists them one after the other. It's like, and then I went to this place, and here's what I thought of the gardens and their art collection. And it's like a long travel log of all the places she visited. But she did move back to Paris in eighteen o five. She had really just gotten settled into a life she quite enjoyed in England, with a well cultivated social circle and plenty of enjoyable invitations just about anywhere she might want to go. But she had gotten word that her daughter had returned to Paris, and she hurried to see her. Julie and her husband had traveled to France on business, but when that business concluded, Nigre returned to St. Petersburg. Julie did not, and in her memoirs, Elizabeth is not the least bit subtle about happy how happy the couple split made her. From eighteen o five on, Elizabeth lived in France for the rest of her life. She spent the time between Paris and the country is She really loved being in the country. It was very inspiring to her um. But then over the course of seven years, there was a great deal of heartbreak in vig Lebron's life. First, in eighteen thirteen, her former husband Jean Baptiste died, and while they had been divorced for some time, the death really did affect her deeply, and she grieved for him. Six years later, in eighteen nineteen, Jean Jowe Louise became ill and her health rapidly deteriorated. When she died, Elizabeth was devastated, but just one year later, Elizabeth's brother Etienne, also died. To cope with her grief, be Lebron traveled to Bordeaux, a town she wasn't really familiar with. The complete shift of mindset from exclusively mourning to also discovering a new place seems to have really helped the painter get through this difficult time, and she reported that her health improved on the journey, also that her spirit was quote less dark when she returned to Paris, and from that point on her brother's two daughters, her nieces Madame de Riviere and Eugenia lebro became her dearest relatives and closest friends. In eighteen thirty five, urged on by her friend Princess Helene Delgaruki of Russia, via Lebrium, published the first volume of her three volume memoir titled Souvenir Dema VI. The next two volumes were published during the following two years, and in the opening of that memoir, when to describing her natural proclivity toward art, Lebron wrote a passage that really beautifully encapsulated her whole life. She wrote, quote I mentioned these facts to show what an inborn passion for the art I possessed. Nor has that passion ever diminished. It seems to me that it has even gone on growing with time. For today. I feel under the spell of it as much as ever, and shall I hope until the hour of death. Lebrun died in Paris on March forty two, at the age of eight six. And she did really paint right up until the end of her life. Uh. In October of last year, the first monographic exhibition of visions Lebroin's work to be mounted in her home country went on display at the Grand Palais in Paris, France. That was also somewhere that she had visited as a child. And that exhibit is now on tour, so if you are lucky, you might be in a place where you can see it. It is currently at the met in New York until mid May. I actually posted one of the portraits that she did a Marie Intoinette and her children. It's the one people sometimes wonder about the empty baby bassinet, and it's because they had lost their fourth child, so that is depicted empty because the child is gone. UH. That will be, as I said, in New York until May, and then it moves to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in June. UH. And you can also check out I think we have a we'll have a link to um the either the METS page or another one that will show the the travel schedule. I'm not sure where it goes from there, but it's spectacular. I really She's one of those artists that I have often admired throughout the years, even before I realized, like all of these portraits that I was in love with were all her. Yeah, it was not a name that I immediately recognized, just because on paper, to me, it looks like French soup. So when I this morning before we recorded, I was tracking down all the artwork that we would use when we put us on our website, and I had just plunged hern Aim into one of the stock image sources that we use, and the only thing that it returned was this portrait of Marie Antoinette. And I had this moment where I was like, but that's Marie Antoinette, And then oh, right now I completely recognized, like all this woman's portraits because I've seen a lot of them and they have a very uh there's a look about them that you can recognize after you look at them for a while. Yeah, Like I mentioned at the top, there's a lightness to them, the way she used light in her portraits was very lovely, and she really none of her portraits ever have a heavy feel like, even when she's using darker tones, they all just have sort of a feeling of brightness and uh, just lightness, even the sad ones. Incidentally, that that portrait that I had just mentioned of Marie Antoinette with her children, which was kind of commissioned by the king in an effort to portray his wife, you know, as a loving mother in the hopes of kind of fixing a little bit of her image at the time time, is one that La mentions in her memoirs that the revolution or Marie Antoinette's grief over the loss of that baby really saved that piece of art from the revolution because it was in the hall and Marie Antoinette would have to walk by it on her way, I believe, to her dressing room, and she finally was like, I can't look at this painting anymore. It makes me sad every time I see it, and it's too upsetting, and so they took it down, and that's why it was not one of the things that was damaged when the palace was ransacked. So sort of grief sort of saved that portrait for us, So we're lucky in that regard. But yeah, I just her memoirs. I highly recommend. They're a pretty fun read. They're very lighthearted. It's kind of interesting because she had this marriage that wasn't great. You know, she had had a stepfather she was not very fond of. Even when she's talking about these deaths that really impacted her, she kind of whips by them pretty quickly. She keeps it very light and a lot of her memoirs are about the fabulous parties she went to and fabulous people she met, and sort of she was really into the social scene. And to me, it's an interesting juxtaposition because someone that writes so much like that, you wouldn't expect to be a completely devoted workhorse. But she was basically like working her tail off all day long to do all of these sittings and paint portraits and keep up with her client list, and then at night she was going to fabulous parties. And it was just like this terrific life that she had put together for herself that she really seemed to love. Like she was like, I designed this life, I'm living it, and I love it, and it's very admirable, and she kind of doesn't even um tend to focus very much on the fact that she was kind of breaking a lot of glass ceilings for women artists at the time. She's just like, oh, yeah, you know, I was cute, so some people wanted me to paint their picture and I was doing some really neat things. Yeah, it's it's very unassuming, even when she's talking about how beautiful she was as a young woman, and I just I clearly love her. Pay so much for joining on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

Happy Saturday, everybody. It is Elizabeth Louise's birthday. So today's Saturday Classic is our episode on her, which we just missed having ready in time for her birthday when we originally released it. She was born in April sixte and this episode originally came out a month after her birthday. On MA got a couple of points in this episode. We mostly me mentioned getting images of our artwork to use on our website, and if you have not been to our website in a few years, we no longer have episode specific artwork on there, but there's still just a ton of her work available to look at online. It is a quick Google image search away, so we hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and well come to the podcast. I'll try and I'm trade v Wilson. And it hasn't actually happened as of when we are recording, but by the time this episode comes out, we will have recently passed the birthday of a very important French artist and we do not have an episode on her. This is what happens when we have to record like an extra three week buffer of episodes ahead of time. Yeah, time travel, time travel, which is fine. I kind of wish I had thought to do it sooner in the year so we could land this nearer her birthday, but we didn't, uh. And A large part of her appeal as a portrait artist was her ability to paint incredibly flattering likenesses. She brought a lightness to her depictions that gives them great life, and she actually made a good living with her art. Although she always had aspirations of working on sort of grand historical art, she was kept very, very busy by a steady list of commissions, starting when she was merely a teenager and lasting throughout her life. Her works, which captured the likenesses of many royals and nobles of her time, are seen literally throughout the world. So if you google Marie Antoinette, you will undoubtedly see several portraits painted by the subject of today's podcast, Elizabeth Louise Holly is going to say that more beautifully than me consistently throughout this entire episode. No, I'm sure I'm clunking it up in my own magical way. So. Elizabeth Louise Vijay was born in Paris on April sixteenth, seventeen fifty five. Her father, Louis vj was a successful artist who specialized in pastel portraits. Because of her father's work, the Vijay family was afforded some access to intellectual circles and society that otherwise would have been a little closed off to them. As a consequence, even as a child, Elizabeth received lessons and encouragement in her artistic pursuits by some of the most popular artists of the day. Yeah, she really was clearly going to be an artist no matter what. She went to boarding school from the ages of six to eleven, and, as I said, an artist from the beginning. She spent most of her time, they're drawing on just about every scrap of paper she came across. She basically couldn't stop making art. She told one story in her memoirs where she was sent outside and she would draw in the sand and the dirt, portraits and and little sketches while she was just standing there in the yard, because she would rather be painting or drawing than doing anything else. Because she was also a little bit of a frail child, her parents would often take her out of school for a few days at a time, so she could go home and kind of recover, And she apparently loved this because she absolutely adored her family. She loved spending time with them, particularly her father, and she also adored her younger brother, Etienne, who was born three years after her. Once she was permanently removed from boarding school, she was quite happy. But her bliss was pretty short lived. Just a year later, her father became seriously ill and he never recovered. He died when Elizabeth was just twelve, and his last words to Elizabeth and Etienne were be happy my children in and the way her memoirs written, those might have been his last words period, but it's not entirely clear, uh, which is so sad and poignant, heartbreaking, And the death of her father was, as you can imagine, really intense once she was very young too. He had kind of been the center of her universe, uh, and it really halted her interest in art for a little while. She describes herself as being unable to pick up her her pastels for a while. But eventually the French painter Gabrielle Francois Doyen, who had been a good friend of Louis vig urged Elizabeth to return to her passion of drawing and painting as a way of coping with her grief, and this is really when she started working in earnest on portraiture. She also started visiting galleries and museum exhibits with her mother, and she became more fully immersed in studying the masters of painting. She copied their styles and various portraits and studies. While Louis had left no financial Christian for the family when he died, she was able to make a little money with her portrait work. But the money that was coming in really wasn't enough to support Elizabeth, her mother, and her brother, and so her mother remarried to a jeweler. But the young woman Elizabeth continued to take portrait clients, and by the age of fifteen, she had set up a studio and began painting portraits basically as her profession, and she quickly grew a considerable clientele. But the money that she was making at this point went right to her stepfather, a man who she pretty frankly detested. Her clientele continued to grow, a fact that Elizabeth attributed not only to her skill as a painter, but also her own good looks. We have self portraits of her as the artwork on our website for these episodes, and I feel like I can see her kind of saying in my mind, yes, I am quite pretty, not in an arrogant way. She has a matter of fact, she's pretty frank about it her memoirs, and she does sort of paint. It's like, I'm not trying to brag, but people would stare at me in public, like I was pretty because my mother was pretty. Yes, so she would later write, quote, since I have acknowledged that I was stared at in the streets, the same is true of the theaters and other public places, and that I was the object of many attentions, that maybe it may readily be guessed that some admirers of my face gave me commissions to paint theirs. They hoped to get into my good graces this way. And I kind of like though that she, while she was very clear throughout her life that her art was her passion, she almost tries to downplay her own skill by going, oh, some of them just wanted to work with me because I was pretty. Just kind of a weird um yeah, like boast slash humbleness. At the same time, I'm not. I'm really not sure what it is exactly about her portraits that makes me feel like she's going, yes, I am quite pretty. She was quite pretty. She also, though, had this very funny way of diverting the attentions of young men who had hired her, in her opinion, to paint their portraits just so they could be with her. Uh. And so she would pose them in such a way that they would always have to be looking away from her, And whenever she would catch them trying to move their their eyes and gaze at her while she painted, she would then say, I'm doing the eyes now, so that they would have to return to the original position and couldn't look at her. Uh. And she always had her mother present when she was painting clients, and this amused her mother as well. She was made a member of the Painters Guild of the Academy de Saint Luke when she was just nineteen, which significantly expanded her professional network and brought in new clients. Uh. That same year, seventeen seventy four, Elizabeth met Jean Baptiste Pierre Raboin, who was an art dealer as well as an artist, and they were neighbors and Elizabeth was eager to visit his home to see his vast collections of art, and while Elizabeth Vija was not thinking about marriage, she was making her own money. At this point, she really didn't see any to worry about getting married and finding a husband to support her. Her mother really encouraged her towards Lebron romantically, hoping to ensure a secure future for her daughter. They got married two years later. Initially, they didn't announce their marriage because Monsieur Lebrun was skipping out on an engagement to the daughter of a Dutch client. During the time their marriage was secret, Elizabeth received numerous warnings from friends and clients that this man would not make a good husband. He's bits of advice and dried up once the couple went public. Four years into their marriage, they had a daughter, Jean Julie Louise, and Elizabeth adored her baby girl. Yeah. Can you imagine being married to someone on the down low and having people come and go, hey, look, I know you've been kind of serious with this guy. You should not marry him. Yeah, he's kind of a jerk. Uh. He was not a great husband. Um aside from being a cheater and a frequent patron of prostitutes. He, like Elizabeth's stepfather, took all of her earnings from her art, and then he gambled all of that away. But Elizabeth generally described him fairly kindly in her writing, despite his faults. She wrote, quote, his character exhibited a mixture of gentleness and liveliness. He was extremely obliging to everybody, and in a word, quite an agreeable person. But his furious passion for gambling was at the bottom of the ruin of his fortune and my own, of which she had the entire disposal. But while Jean Baptiste was not an ideal as a spouse, his art collection was another matter. She studied the many paintings and prints that he amassed with great fervor. She really loved it, and in seventy two the couple traveled to lepai Ba the Low Countries. So a quick geography aside, just in case you do not know uh that designation. The Low Countries is the name given to the coastal region of northwestern Europe that includes Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium. While traveling in the Low Country, Elizabeth studied another Landish art, the glaze working color palette of Rubens was especially impactful, and it shaped the young woman's arn't going forward from that point, and we're about to get to the moment in her life that really launched career into the stratosphere. But before we do that, we're going to pause for a word from one of our sponsors, which she was only twenty three. J Lebrun was commissioned for an incredibly prestigious task. She was to paint the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. She described the Queen at the time as incredibly lovely. Quote. Marie Antoinette was tall and admirably built, being somewhat stout, but not excessively so. Her arms were superb, her hands small and perfectly formed, and her feet charming. She had the best walk of any woman in France, carrying her head erect with dignity that stamped her queen in the midst of her whole court. Her majestic man, however, not the least diminishing with sweetness and amiability of her face. To anyone who has not seen the Queen, it is difficult to get an idea of all the graces and all the nobility combined in her person. And while Leo was initially afraid of the queen, as I can't imagine anyone wouldn't be kind of nervous doing a portrait for a royalty. Marie Antoinette was apparently very gracious with the painter and the two really became quite friendly. Eventually the pair would sing together while the painter worked once she had heard that Elizabeth was had a fairly good singing voice. They liked to sing together while she sat for portraits, which I find so charming. Uh. And Elizabeth's time and Versailles working on that first portrait of Louis the sixteenth wife really led to great success for the young artist. She became a court artist and was well paid for the position. She was the first woman to ever become an artist to the king, so it was quite significant. And over the course of the ten years from seventeen seventy nine to seventeen eighty nine, Leboin painted thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette. You've probably seen many of them. I would say. One of the most famous ones that immediately comes to mind when I imagine portraits of Marie Antoinette is one of hers. Yeah, I mean several. If you'd like go through your head and go, oh, there's that other portrait of Oh yeah, and there's they're probably most of them are the ones that Leboin painted. They're beautiful. Louis the sixteenth was also a fan of all these portraits, and he once told the painter quote, I know nothing about painting, but you make me like it. I think that's so sweet. I mean, he was a mess in many ways, but I find that quote terribly charming. Becoming one of the queen's favorites definitely had some benefits. In seventeen eighty three, it was Marie Antoinette's influence that finally got the Academy Royal Pol to accept Via Lebois as a member. This professional artist organization of incredible prestige rarely accepted women, and Va Lebron had been trying for years to get in, but her husband's work as an art dealer had been a little bit of a roadblock. It was kind of a sticking point that maybe this was more of a business thing than an art thing. And she was actually only one of four women in the organization when she was admitted, and she was and the fact that she was there was it came with a little bit of a level of resentment on the part of the organization. Basically, they did not appreciate that they had been pressured by the monarchy to accept Via Lebroin. But if you know anything about Marie Antoinette, you know that anyone and everyone associated with her eventually became mired in rumors and accusations as a queen's tendency to attract scandal really radiated to all of her friends. There was gossip that vj Lebron was not actually an artist, but instead that her work was done by a ghost painter, and that she had used sexual prowess to raise her position in court. Throughout all of this, the Vija Lebron painted. She created portraits of many of the more famous figures of the Louis the sixteenth court, including Madame du Berri and the Duchess de Polignac. She had as many as three sittings per day on her schedule, and she worked furiously to keep up with the demand for her work. She really had an incredible work ethic. She worked so hard that she actually became ill. For a time, her digestion suffered. It became quite poor. She was unable to eat, and she lost a great deal of weight. The remedy, according to her doctor, was to go to bed immediately after eating dinner, and that sounds counter to a lot of modern advice. Most people will say, don't go lie down with a heavy meal on your stomach, but the painter really credited this habit was saving her life, as she she really did regain strength and put some weight back on following uh these doctors orders. Vija Lebron was in many ways the toast of the town at this sphase of her career. People came to visit her at her at her home studio often, although she believed some of them were also there to see her husband's art collection, and she often hosted readings by poets and impromptu opera performances. Despite being a favorite of the Queen and part of a very vibrant French social scene, vi Lebrun was not a slave to fashion. She didn't really like the fashion of the day. She found it fussy and sort of ridiculous in many ways, and she often tried to persuade her subjects to abandon their trendy clothing for simpler and more classical drapings when she was painting them. If you look at a lot of these portraits that she did, she does have them kind of draped and just very simple robes, shawls, etcetera. She had to have dresses specially made to go to Versailles for her sittings with Marie Antoinette. She didn't just have fancy clothes on hand. Uh. And she always did her own hair, which I thought was sort of charming as well. She also hated the powdered look of hair. She constantly begged her clients to please sit with their natural hair color and not powder their hair. As the French Revolution heated up and sentiment again the royal court really started to grow. Len eventually fled France for her own safely safety things. It got to the point where her home was targeted. People would shake their fists at her when she left the house, and someone had thrown sulfur into the cellar, which sounds awful. Yeah, I also wonder, and I don't know, Uh, this is purely speculation, but I wonder if that could potentially have damaged any paintings like just the You know, if you think of an oil painting, they take a long time to cure, and I imagine having weird things in the air might do some damage to some of it, but I don't know. That's again just speculation on my part, a question mark if anybody knows, right us and tell us. For a long while, though, resisted her urge to leave France because she didn't want to break the large number of commissions that she had in her queue. She really worked constantly. She always had people on basically a wait list just waiting to be the to have an availability. But in the fall of eight and she was so shaken by some of the violent ends that many of her society acquaintances were meeting that she had in fact decided to leave, and so she packed her carriage and prepared her exit. But the night before she was planning to go, several armed men broke into her room, and they appeared to be inebriated, and they harassed her for a while, but they did eventually leave. Later, two of them came back and told her that they were neighbors and meant her no harm, but that she simply had to go. They further advised her not to take her own carriage but instead to take a stage coach. She took their advice and a week later left on the first stage coach she had been able to book, and so she was moving and with her young daughter to Italy, and when she did so, her French citizenship was revoked. She estimated that in her career up to that point she had earned more than a million francs, but thanks to her husband's gambling, she had almost nothing to her name when she fled. Returning to France was impossible for twelve years, and during that time she traveled to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and eventually Russia, which she really loved and she stayed there for six years. Coming up, we'll get into a bit of detail about some unfortunate events in St. Petersburg, Russia, as well as the painters later life, But first we're going to pause for a very word from a sponsor. So during all of these travels, when she was outside of France, Vi Lebois was painting portraits to earn a living to support herself and her daughter. But this was definitely not a case of an artist scraping by and doing work for pittances. Elizabeth's reputation as an artist was really impressive. She was basically welcomed into all of the houses of rulers and dignitaries throughout any of the areas she traveled in. They were all more than happy to pay the gifted painter to create beautiful portraits of themselves and their families. She lived quite well while he was in exile. During her time away from France, Elizabeth and her husband severed their ties. In seventeen ninety three, Jean Baptiste Pierre Le divorced his wife under duress from revolutionary authorities who labeled Elizabeth as a deserter for having fled the country. And in addition to the portraits which were her bread and butter, uh I just wanted to mention that while she was traveling, she did hundreds, literally hundreds of landscaped pieces during her travel, somewhere in oils and somewhere in Pastel's and those are things that didn't always get a lot of attention from the art world, but they're getting a little bit more, uh interest now. While she loved St. Petersburg, particularly her relationship with her daughter suffered there. Jean Julie Louise had grown into a lovely girl, and, like her mother before her, received a great deal of attention from potential suitors. When Julie as she was called, was seventeen. She fell in love with a man about a dozen years older because they was Degree and he was secretary to account and when visual Lebron got wind of this budding romance, she was first of all heartbroken at the thought of losing her daughter. We spoke when we mentioned her baby girl being born that she was really devoted to her, and that stayed the case throughout her life. She was so devoted to her child. Uh. But then she started to ask around to get information and opinions on Degree, but the things that she was hearing were something of a mixed bag. Some people really loved him and others had really little good to say about him. But more concerning to the mother was really the fact it almost is a repeat of how she got into her marriage with Lebron, uh, is that she was concerned that Negree was not really well positioned. He had an okay job, but he really didn't have like a great job, and Elizabeth advised her daughter against marriage, and it eventually drove a huge wedge between mother and daughter. The couple married, and while Vija Lebrown fulfilled the duties of the bride's family, including giving the couple a sum of money from her recent commissions. She was not a happy mother of the bride. When mother visited her newly wet daughter in the weeks following the wedding, it appeared that Julie wasn't especially happy either, although she was resigned to stay and just as Visa, Lebron was coping with the heartbreak of seeing her only child in what appeared to be an unhappy marriage. Uh the artist's mother died, and the combined stresses and unhappiness of these events really took their toll, and in an effort to escape via change of scenery, Lebron decided to head to Moscow in eighteen o one, as Russia was itself in the midst of political turmoil related to the French Revolution and shifting loyalties via Lebron was once again ill. She continued to suffer both physically and mentally, and then decided to leave Russia and le Bron returned to Paris after making several visits throughout cities in Europe. She kind of took a long, circuitous route home and she was greeted by happy friends and family who were overjoyed to see her once again. Once She did reach Paris, but she really didn't feel at home in the changed city in general. She wrote, Paris has a less lively appearance to me. And seeing the words liberty, fraternity, or death that were scrawled on the walls around the city which had been part of the revolution, really saddened her, and it reminded her of what she what her life had once been, and what she had lost because of her melancholy at being in the city she had once loved so much. The Brown moved to London in eighteen o two. She wasn't entirely enamored with England either. She's found it rather drab and uninspiring, and the damp climate meant that her paintings took a really long time to dry. She didn't find the art community entirely welcoming either, and some of them even printed criticisms of the French school of art and all who came from it. Yeah, she got kind of embroiled in a back and forth with another artist who printed some nasty things quite clearly aimed at her uh and she wrote him a letter in defense of of the French artists that circulated among society. Like everyone knew about this letter, so it was good, not the best welcome in terms of that, although she did have friends there. But shortly after visual leb arrived in London, the treat of the Treaty of Amiens was signed, and as part of that treaty, any French person in England who had been there less than a year was to be sent out of the country. But because Elizabeth did move in illustrious circles, the Prince of Wales was able to secure a special permission from King George the Third that enabled her to stay. She remained in England for almost three years, visiting all of the royal residences and castles. You could possibly imagine. Her memoir just sort of lists them one after the other. It's like, and then I went to this place, and here's what I thought of the gardens and their art collection. And it's like a long travel log of all the places she visited. But she did move back to Paris in eighteen o five. She had really just gotten settled into a life she quite enjoyed in England, with a well cultivated social circle and plenty of enjoyable invitations just about anywhere she might want to go. But she had gotten word that her daughter had returned to Paris, and she hurried to see her. Julie and her husband had traveled to France on business, but when that business concluded, Nigre returned to St. Petersburg. Julie did not, and in her memoirs, Elizabeth is not the least bit subtle about happy how happy the couple split made her. From eighteen o five on, Elizabeth lived in France for the rest of her life. She spent the time between Paris and the country is She really loved being in the country. It was very inspiring to her um. But then over the course of seven years, there was a great deal of heartbreak in vig Lebron's life. First, in eighteen thirteen, her former husband Jean Baptiste died, and while they had been divorced for some time, the death really did affect her deeply, and she grieved for him. Six years later, in eighteen nineteen, Jean Jowe Louise became ill and her health rapidly deteriorated. When she died, Elizabeth was devastated, but just one year later, Elizabeth's brother Etienne, also died. To cope with her grief, be Lebron traveled to Bordeaux, a town she wasn't really familiar with. The complete shift of mindset from exclusively mourning to also discovering a new place seems to have really helped the painter get through this difficult time, and she reported that her health improved on the journey, also that her spirit was quote less dark when she returned to Paris, and from that point on her brother's two daughters, her nieces Madame de Riviere and Eugenia lebro became her dearest relatives and closest friends. In eighteen thirty five, urged on by her friend Princess Helene Delgaruki of Russia, via Lebrium, published the first volume of her three volume memoir titled Souvenir Dema VI. The next two volumes were published during the following two years, and in the opening of that memoir, when to describing her natural proclivity toward art, Lebron wrote a passage that really beautifully encapsulated her whole life. She wrote, quote I mentioned these facts to show what an inborn passion for the art I possessed. Nor has that passion ever diminished. It seems to me that it has even gone on growing with time. For today. I feel under the spell of it as much as ever, and shall I hope until the hour of death. Lebrun died in Paris on March forty two, at the age of eight six. And she did really paint right up until the end of her life. Uh. In October of last year, the first monographic exhibition of visions Lebroin's work to be mounted in her home country went on display at the Grand Palais in Paris, France. That was also somewhere that she had visited as a child. And that exhibit is now on tour, so if you are lucky, you might be in a place where you can see it. It is currently at the met in New York until mid May. I actually posted one of the portraits that she did a Marie Intoinette and her children. It's the one people sometimes wonder about the empty baby bassinet, and it's because they had lost their fourth child, so that is depicted empty because the child is gone. UH. That will be, as I said, in New York until May, and then it moves to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in June. UH. And you can also check out I think we have a we'll have a link to um the either the METS page or another one that will show the the travel schedule. I'm not sure where it goes from there, but it's spectacular. I really She's one of those artists that I have often admired throughout the years, even before I realized, like all of these portraits that I was in love with were all her. Yeah, it was not a name that I immediately recognized, just because on paper, to me, it looks like French soup. So when I this morning before we recorded, I was tracking down all the artwork that we would use when we put us on our website, and I had just plunged hern Aim into one of the stock image sources that we use, and the only thing that it returned was this portrait of Marie Antoinette. And I had this moment where I was like, but that's Marie Antoinette, And then oh, right now I completely recognized, like all this woman's portraits because I've seen a lot of them and they have a very uh there's a look about them that you can recognize after you look at them for a while. Yeah, Like I mentioned at the top, there's a lightness to them, the way she used light in her portraits was very lovely, and she really none of her portraits ever have a heavy feel like, even when she's using darker tones, they all just have sort of a feeling of brightness and uh, just lightness, even the sad ones. Incidentally, that that portrait that I had just mentioned of Marie Antoinette with her children, which was kind of commissioned by the king in an effort to portray his wife, you know, as a loving mother in the hopes of kind of fixing a little bit of her image at the time time, is one that La mentions in her memoirs that the revolution or Marie Antoinette's grief over the loss of that baby really saved that piece of art from the revolution because it was in the hall and Marie Antoinette would have to walk by it on her way, I believe, to her dressing room, and she finally was like, I can't look at this painting anymore. It makes me sad every time I see it, and it's too upsetting, and so they took it down, and that's why it was not one of the things that was damaged when the palace was ransacked. So sort of grief sort of saved that portrait for us, So we're lucky in that regard. But yeah, I just her memoirs. I highly recommend. They're a pretty fun read. They're very lighthearted. It's kind of interesting because she had this marriage that wasn't great. You know, she had had a stepfather she was not very fond of. Even when she's talking about these deaths that really impacted her, she kind of whips by them pretty quickly. She keeps it very light and a lot of her memoirs are about the fabulous parties she went to and fabulous people she met, and sort of she was really into the social scene. And to me, it's an interesting juxtaposition because someone that writes so much like that, you wouldn't expect to be a completely devoted workhorse. But she was basically like working her tail off all day long to do all of these sittings and paint portraits and keep up with her client list, and then at night she was going to fabulous parties. And it was just like this terrific life that she had put together for herself that she really seemed to love. Like she was like, I designed this life, I'm living it, and I love it, and it's very admirable, and she kind of doesn't even um tend to focus very much on the fact that she was kind of breaking a lot of glass ceilings for women artists at the time. She's just like, oh, yeah, you know, I was cute, so some people wanted me to paint their picture and I was doing some really neat things. Yeah, it's it's very unassuming, even when she's talking about how beautiful she was as a young woman, and I just I clearly love her. Pay so much for joining on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,