Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun 29. Self-portrait, 1789 Pastel on paper, 195/8 x 15¾ in. (50 x 40 cm). Inscribed on backing: 28. novbre 1816 / Légué par Mr Menageot / à Mme Nigris — / Ce dessin représente Mme Le Brun / il est fait par elle-même. Private collection
30. Lady Ossulston (Corisande de Gramont, 1783 – 1865), ca. 1806 Pastel on paper, laid down on canvas; 18 x 13¼ in. (45.7 x 33.7 cm). Private collection
shows a married woman of the highest rank in the guise of a peasant, coy, sensual, and acutely self-aware. Her costume could perhaps have been worn at the little village near the Petit Trianon at Versailles that was then being built for the amusement of Marie Antoinette. Her bodice is laced with a quantity of pinked ribbons; her cap is edged with lace. The flushes of color are blended, and the surface is pristine and highly finished. Pastel crayons are portable, so it is not surprising to find a pastel self-portrait of Vigée Le Brun wearing traveling clothes that she painted in Italy not long after her forced departure from the French capital. According to an inscription on the original backing the work was bequeathed to Vigée Le Brun’s daughter, Madame Nigris, by Monsieur Ménageot, that is, François Guillaume
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Ménageot, director of the Académie de France in Rome at the time of Vigée Le Brun’s arrival there in late November 1789. She and Ménageot were close friends, and this beautiful image was perhaps her gift to him. It is executed in a narrow range of pale transparent colors with a light touch, the face more finished than the costume. Vigée Le Brun wears a coat with a cape collar and a gauze fichu and bonnet, the bonnet delicately fluted in soft gray and white strokes with black accents. Her dress is more that of citizeness than courtier. The sitter, with her delicate skin, looks young and vulnerable, although she was thirty-four at the time and the mother of a nine-year-old. Lady Ossulston, born in 1783 and baptized Corisande Armandine Sophie Léonie Hélène, was Aglaé de Polignac’s daughter. Because of her family’s close ties in England, Corisande, having escaped from Paris while still a child, was brought up in the household of William, 5th Duke of Devonshire, and his wife Georgiana. Although the young woman was a refugee without financial resources, owing to her connections she was able to find an eligible husband nevertheless. According to the registers of Saint George’s Church in Hanover Square, on July 28, 1806, at Devonshire House, London, she married Charles Augustus Bennet, Lord Ossulston, who in 1822 would succeed as the 5th Earl of Tankerville and in the meantime held several seats in Parliament. After he died in 1859 the pastel descended in the family until recently.
Corisande, a slender young woman with large dark eyes, wears the Neoclassical dress and gauze scarf then in style. The striking contrast between this portrait and that of Corisande’s mother (no. 28) demonstrates the marked change in the style (simpler) and substance (more direct) of French portraiture that occurred in consequence of the French Revolution.
Pierre Paul Prud’hon
(French, Cluny 1758 – 1823 Paris)
31. Nicolas Perchet, 1795 Pastel on blue-gray paper, oval; 15¾ x 12¼ in. (40 x 31 cm). Princeton University Art Museum, Museum Purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund (2010-15)
Pierre Paul Prud’hon, from Cluny in southern Burgundy and the son of a stonemason, came to the attention of his parish priest and was sent at public expense to the Dijon drawing academy of François Devosge (1732 – 1811). Prud’hon was orphaned in 1776. In 1780, with sponsorship from a private patron, he departed for Paris to enroll at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Three years later he returned to Dijon to take up his first public commission, for a ceiling decoration. In 1784 he won the Prix de Rome, and late that year he departed for Rome, where he stud-