"My dearest, you have pressed me so often to write the story of my life that at last I have decided to satisfy your desire." - Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun

Books Since it’s Valentine’s Day and I’ve no one to hold my hand again, I thought I’d write about the first girl in a painting that I fell in love with (if such things are possible). Elisabeth Louise Vigee-Le Brun was a portrait painter who worked around the time of the French revolution and the self-portrait which adorns the above cover is the first time I encountered her, at the National Gallery in the very early nineties. I’ve seen it a few times since though, even locally at the Face to Face: Three Centuries of Artists’ Self-portraiture exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery (catalogue still available).

I now can’t really say what I found particularly striking about this image and certainly, since Vigee-Le Brun was famous for flattering her subjects I wonder the extent to which she really looked like that. I think the point was she isn’t perfect; unlike the Pre-Raphaelite beauties who are meant to have an otherworldliness, my teenage mind decided that this girl looked as though she once breathed and that I could talk to her about painting and art and music and what life was like in France at the time.

She represented the exotic in comparison to some of the drabness I was living with then. I bought the postcard and the picture has followed me around, always somehow managing to find itself blue-tacked to some surface or other, at university or at home. It’s on the wall above computer as I write, adjacent to pictures of a pig flying around the Earth, a Chambre-Hardman photograph taken from the old Liverpool Museum steps, Robert Hopper’s Nighthawks and a watch in the shape of a book from late 16th century Munich.

Every time I’ve glanced towards it I’ve wondered actually what she was like, if she lived up to my imagination. Then passing through a second-hand bookshop in Southport not too long ago I stumbled upon The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun in a translation from 1989. There are versions available on-line, but none of them really sound ‘right’ – or they don’t sound as though they were written by someone living at time, the idiom too modern perhaps. Sian Evans, the translator for this volume has purposefully attempted to preserve the style in which it was written and just reading the first few lines, I could imagine Elisabeth's voice narrating (or at least Julie Delpy’s).

These are not memoirs in the traditional sense. As she relates, her friends were always clamouring for her to write something about her life and at first she did this in the form of letters, each covering a different topic of her early life. So there’s her childhood, the first flowerings of her talent, her marriage, what she thought of music and theatre, on throwing parties and perhaps crucially for historians her visits to Versaille to paint Marie-Antoinette in the period just before the revolution and her own self-appointed exile from the country of her birth, although oddly not much about the craft of painting other than that she worked incredibly fast often fitting three sittings into a day.

You’re constantly aware that this is the older artists reflecting back upon her youth, with a certain amount of longing for before the Revolution when the aristocracy still held sway in France. It’s because of that status quo that her talent as a portraitist could flourish, being invited to their version of the Royal Academy as a teenger and moving in circles who were desperate for her abilities in capturing their likeness. Much of the time is spent simply describing those who sat for her, and she doesn’t pull punches in relation to whom she considers attractive or not. She treats them all with the same hand and the results as presented at the centre of the book are often breathtaking.

Contrary to expectations, she was a very forthright, largely independent woman at a time when such things couldn't naturally be expected. She married her husband out of duty. Inevitably he was a louse spending the money she was amassing from painting on booze and gambling and failed business ventures. Elisabeth carried on regardless; it was a loveless marriage and she has no good things to say about the man, but it provided opportunities which simply would not have come to a spinster. The couple had children, but Vigee-Le Brun doesn’t let that get in the way of her painting, her waters breaking between sessions, planning works between contractions.

She’s particularly lucid in regards to fame. Though she mixed with the rich and infamous, her own lifestyle was rather modest. Memorably she describes how, when at the height of her early notoriety she gave a party in their apartments and invited much of the local A-listers; it wasn’t a lavish affair by some standards and she offers some details as to the corners cut and the ingenuity which went into the food and costumes. But in a prescient example of how stories about the famous can get out of hand, by the time it reached Russia the party had become one of the greatest in history costing in excess of a hundred and fifty thousand francs and how terrible that such a thing might happen whilst her country starved. As she complains, it scarce cost more that fifteen fancs.

The most exciting sections are those related to the royal household in which she offers first hand though admittedly sympathetic account of Marie Antoinette sitting for her. One of the travesties of the recent Sophia Coppola film is that many of the costumes were inspired by Vigee-Le Brun’s paintings but the artist is scarcely seen. There is a shot of a figure that may be her and certainly the painting she’s working on is very like the 1787 work which is included at the centre of the book but the versions of her work which appear are travesties of the originals, perhaps deliberately cooked up by someone who lacks her talent.

What is similar to that film is that Marie comes across as a rather ordinary girl put into an extraordinary situation who in the end was guillotined because of the position she held rather than because of anything specific she did. When Elisabeth misses a sitting because of pregnancy pains, she’s given leave to return the following day and after moving awkwardly and dropping her paints to the floor it’s the queen who quickly moves to tidy things up for her.

Of course this is but one woman’s view of a well recorded situation but it’s difficult not find a twinge of regret that one of the ways the country decided upon to solve its problems was the murder of someone’s mother for the crime of being in a different social class. Perhaps my royalist tendencies are got the better of me here, but it seems unlikely that the populace would have held off revolting even if she hadn’t been keeping up appearances and instead been giving away all of her money.

These gossipy words capture a country in transition in which her friends and family and friends of friends are scattered across Europe to escape the onslaught. In the final letters she carefully lists all of the people she knows who were effected by the revolution and what their fate were. Even though Vigee-Le Brun was not writing in a literary style you can see that she regrets the shift from civilisation to barbarism and high-culture being thrown out almost wholesale as a product of the people they are fighting against. But in these closing moments that for some, even as they’re escaping the carnage, their reputation proceeds them and there’s nothing to be done.

I can’t say what happened beyond that because I’m savouring the book and have decided that for now, perhaps for this year, I’d just concentrate on the letters. Afterwards the book becomes more of a traditional autobiography with chapters and structure and more of a concerted effort to record her life and admittedly goes beyond the period in which that portrait was painted. Clearly because these are memoirs, Elisabeth’s fate is fairly certain but the back cover promises a grand tour of Europe and its aristocracies and a change in artistic direction.

That's for the future and I’ll report back. For now though at least I can say that the teenage version of me had very good taste. Pity none of the girls I knew back then thought so.

Happy Valentine's Day, the minutes that are left of it.