Préville dans le rôle de Mascarille dans l'Étourdi de Molière

This 1776 portrait of the actor Préville as Mascarille in Molière’s L’Étourdi at the Comédie-Française captures one of the greatest comic actors of 18th-century French theater. Vigée Le Brun’s theatrical portraits constitute an important subgenre of her work, documenting the performing arts culture that was central to Parisian social life. 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 theatrical costume provides vivid color and texture that Vigée Le Brun renders with characteristic skill. The actor’s comic expression is captured with the animated naturalism that distinguishes her theatrical portraits.