Allegory of Poetry

This 1774 Allegory of Poetry at the Musée Fabre is among Vigée Le Brun’s earliest surviving works, painted when she was just nineteen. The allegorical subject demonstrates the young artist’s ambition to work beyond simple portraiture, engaging with the academic tradition of personified virtues and arts that dominated French painting. 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 allegorical figure is rendered with the luminous flesh tones that would become Vigée Le Brun’s trademark. The youthful work already shows confidence in figure composition and classical drapery handling.