Bildnis der Madame Baudin

This 1835 portrait of Madame Baudin at the Bavarian State Painting Collections is one of Vigée Le Brun’s very late works, painted when the artist was eighty years old. Her remarkable longevity—she died in 1842 at eighty-seven—meant that her career spanned from the reign of Louis XV through the July Monarchy, an unprecedented arc in art history. 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.

Despite the artist’s advanced age, the portrait shows continued technical competence. The handling may be slightly less fluid than her peak years but maintains the essential luminosity and elegance of her lifelong approach.