Portrait de Julie Lebrun portant une couronne de roses

This 1792 portrait of Julie Lebrun wearing a crown of roses at the Galleria Nazionale di Parma shows the artist’s twelve-year-old daughter in an idealized pastoral guise. The rose crown connects Julie to the Rococo tradition of Flora and the Seasons while expressing her mother’s view of childhood as a time of natural beauty and innocence. Vigée Le Brun was the most technically accomplished and socially successful woman painter of the eighteenth century, achieving membership of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1783 and a clientele that extended from the French royal family to the courts of Russia, Austria, and Italy during her decade of exile following the Revolution. Her portrait manner combined the neoclassical formal values of her training with a quality of feminine intimacy and emotional warmth that made her portraits of women and children especially celebrated. Her ability to make her sitters appear simultaneously dignified and approachable was the technical foundation of her social success.

The rose crown provides color accents against Julie’s dark hair, while her soft features are rendered with exceptional maternal tenderness. Vigée Le Brun’s brushwork is at its most delicate in this intimate family portrait.