Portrait of Aglaé Angélique Gabrielle de Gramont (1787-1842), wife of General Aleksandr Davydov

This 1824 portrait of Aglaé Angélique Gabrielle de Gramont demonstrates Vigée Le Brun’s continued productivity in her late career during the Bourbon Restoration. Having survived revolution, exile, and political upheaval, the artist maintained her portrait practice, painting the children and grandchildren of her original ancien régime clientele. 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 late portrait maintains Vigée Le Brun’s refined technique though the style has evolved with the times. The handling reflects both her established aesthetic and the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 1820s.