Portrait of a boy playing with a yo-yo (emigrette)

This 1789 portrait of a boy playing with a yo-yo (then called an “émigrette”) at the Museum Leblanc-Duvernoy captures a contemporary toy craze in pre-revolutionary French society. The yo-yo had become fashionable in French aristocratic circles, and its inclusion in this portrait adds a charming period detail to Vigée Le Brun’s sensitive treatment of childhood. 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 child’s absorbed concentration on the toy creates a natural, unposed quality. Vigée Le Brun’s soft modeling and warm palette are particularly effective in rendering the freshness of youth.