Jeanne Julie Louise Lebrun, the Artist's Daughter, Two Years Old

This 1782 portrait of Julie Lebrun at two years old at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm shows Vigée Le Brun’s daughter as a toddler, capturing the earliest stage of a subject the artist would paint repeatedly throughout Julie’s childhood and youth. The tender rendering of maternal love in these family portraits ranks among Vigée Le Brun’s most touching achievements. 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 child’s plump features and bright eyes are rendered with exceptional tenderness and luminous warmth. Vigée Le Brun’s brushwork achieves a soft, almost effortless quality that conveys the innocence and vulnerability of early childhood.