Porträt der Theresa, Gräfin Kinsky

This 1793 portrait of Theresa, Countess Kinsky, at the Norton Simon Museum was painted during Vigée Le Brun’s Viennese period. The Kinsky family, one of the great Bohemian-Austrian aristocratic dynasties, represented the kind of Habsburg court connections that made Vienna a productive base for Vigée Le Brun’s exile portrait 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 Norton Simon portrait exemplifies Vigée Le Brun’s Viennese manner, with careful attention to aristocratic costume and bearing. Her characteristic warm, flattering light models the countess’s features with diplomatic grace.