The Artist at Work (Self Portrait)

The Artist at Work, a self-portrait from around 1784, shows Vigée Le Brun at her easel during the period when she was Queen Marie Antoinette’s preferred portraitist. Such working self-portraits served to promote the artist’s professional identity and to assert the intellectual and social respectability of women’s artistic practice. 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 composition shows the artist actively painting, establishing her professional identity through the depiction of work in progress. Vigée Le Brun renders her own features with the same luminous technique she employed for her patrons.