Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun: Back to France

"Caroline Murat, later Queen of Naples
and Her Daughter" by Vigee-Lebrun

Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun wrote: "I had come to England with the intention of remaining but five or six months, I had now stayed nearly three years, held, not solely by my interests as a painter, but also by the kind treatment bestowed upon me. I should, therefore, not have decided to return to France so soon had I not learned that my daughter had arrived at Paris. I keenly longed to see her again. It surely needed a deep motive to resist the appeals which friends and even acquaintances were kind enough to make.

It was a great joy to me to see my friends once more, and especially my daughter. Her husband, whom she had accompanied to France, was charged by Prince Narischkin with the mission of engaging musical artists for St. Petersburg. He left a few months later, but alone – for love, alas! had long since vanished – and my daughter remained, to my great satisfaction. Her power over my mind was great, and I had none over hers, and it will be understood how she sometimes made me shed bitter tears. Still, she was my daughter. Her beauty, her gifts, her cleverness rendered her as fascinating as possible, and, though I mourned because I could not persuade her to come to live with me, since she persisted in seeing certain people I would not receive, I at any rate saw her every day, and that in itself was a great blessing. 

One day Napoleon gave me an order to paint his sister, Mme. Murat. I thought I could not refuse, although I was only to be paid 1,800 francs – that is to say, less than half of what I usually asked for portraits of the same size. This sum was the more moderate, too, because, for the sake of satisfying myself as to the composition of the picture, I painted Mme. Murat's pretty little girl beside her, and that without raising the price.

I could not conceivably describe all the annoyances, all the torments I underwent in painting this picture. To begin with, at the first sitting, Mme. Murat brought two lady's maids, who were to do her hair while I was painting her. However, upon my remark that I could not under such circumstances do justice to her features, she vouchsafed to send her servants away. Then she perpetually failed to keep the appointments she made with me, so that, in my desire to finish, I was kept in Paris nearly the whole summer, as a rule waiting for her in vain, which angered me unspeakably. Moreover, the intervals between the sittings were so long that she sometimes changed her mode of doing her hair. In the beginning, for instance, she wore curls hanging over her cheeks, and I painted them accordingly; but some time after, this having gone out of fashion, she came back with her hair dressed in a totally different manner, so that I was forced to scrape off the hair I had painted on the face, and was likewise compelled to blot out a brow-band of pearls and put cameos in its place. 

The same thing happened with her dress. One I had painted at first was cut rather open, as dresses were then so worn, and furnished with wide embroidering. The fashion having changed, I was obliged to close in the dress and do the embroidering anew. All the annoyances that Mme. Murat subjected me to at last put me so much out of temper that one day, when she was in my studio, I said to M. Denon, loudly enough for her to hear, 'I have painted real princesses who never worried me, and never made me wait.' The fact is, Mme. Murat was unaware that punctuality is the politeness of kings, as Louis XIV so well said."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memoirs of Madame Vigee-Lebrun.")