Portrait of a Girl

This portrait of a girl at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya demonstrates Vigée Le Brun’s sensitivity in painting young subjects. Her portraits of children and young women are among her most appealing works, capturing the freshness and natural beauty of youth with a tenderness that distinguishes them from more formal adult commissions. 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 young sitter’s features are rendered with soft, delicate brushwork appropriate to the youthful subject. Vigée Le Brun’s palette is particularly fresh and luminous in this portrait of girlhood.