Whereas Artemesia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes is a narrative painting, full of tense and dramatic action, Vigee Le Brun’s Marie Antoinette and Her Children is a formal historical portrait, depicting a comparatively static family grouping. Yet it is not without emotion and pathos. Painted in 1787, her death by guillotine still a few years off, the ill-fated queen appears here as a serene matron, comfortably seated in a salon with her feet on a cushion, surrounded by her children.
Marie Antoinette and her Children as an Ordinary Family
Princess Marie-Thérèse stands on her mother’s right, leaning confidingly against her shoulder, clasping her arm and lovingly looking up into her face. On the left, the Dauphin, Louis-Joseph, stands pointing at an empty cradle draped in black, which alludes to the Princess Sophie, who died in infancy. In her lap Marie Antoinette holds her youngest child, Louis-Charles.
The queen and her children are dignified but simply dressed, in an interior setting more cosy than grand. They sit in an intimate, closely drawn circle, while the darkness in the background encloses them, imparting a private and confined atmosphere.
The royal portrait features the naturalness, spontaneity, and softness typical of Vigée Le Brun’s work. The figures, their positions and facial expressions, appear pleasant, amiable, and relaxed, as if interrupted in a moment of peaceful family intimacy but at the same time welcoming the viewer into their little circle.
Attempt to Fix Marie Antoinette's Damaged Reputation
While the painting reflects the bourgeois values of the day, it also hints at an even more exalted ideal. The triangular grouping, with Marie Antoinette’s stately yet motherly figure draped in the folds of her gown and surrounded by small angelic children, resembles a religious icon.
The portrait may have been undertaken in an effort to repair Marie Antoinette’s damaged reputation, but it is obvious that the artist was also sincerely sympathetic with her subject. In her memoirs, Vigée Le Brun speaks warmly of Marie Antoinette’s sensitivity and consideration towards her.
Friendship Between Marie Antoinette and Vigee Le Brun
Gita May, in the biography Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution, speculates that the two women, despite their very disparate social positions, probably found that they had a lot in common, as unhappy wives and as targets of increasingly vicious calumnies, one as a foreigner, the other as a woman artist intent on making a name for herself in a world overwhelmingly dominated by men.
Vigée Le Brun’s affection for Marie Antoinette no doubt extended to the queen’s children. By the time she painted this portrait, her own daughter Julie would have been seven years old. May points out that the vicious rumours about the queen’s promiscuity also called into question her children’s paternity. So it was not only Marie Antoinette’s image that Vigée Le Brun was trying to repair but also the children’s.
Marie Antoinette and Her Children is an idealized portrait of a family who in reality was much hated, reviled, and destined for a tragic end. However there are no fierce emotions here, no drama, no violence. There is only an easy warmth, familiarity, and affection. In the company of her children and at least one sympathetic friend, Marie Antoinette might have had some happy moments after all. And in immortalizing the tragic queen, Le Brun succeeded in humanizing her as well.
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