“Only in painting have I found happiness,” Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun confided at the end of her long, prolific career. Though Vigée Le Brun’s high society portraits earned her great fame during her lifetime, her sentimental style fell out of fashion and she largely dropped off the radar. Her long overdue retrospective, “Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (February 15 to May 15, 2016). Organized at the Met by Katharine Baetjer, curator in the department of European paintings, the exhibition follows Vigée Le Brun’s singular career chronologically -- from Paris to her peripatetic years as an émigré artist and return to France. According to Baetjer, preparation for the exhibition confirmed Vigée Le Brun’s technical skills. “Her works on both canvas and panel are exceptionally well preserved and, as far as one can know, seem to look much as they did when they were painted.” We first meet the artist in a terracotta Read More
Catherine the Great: “Glutton” or Connoisseur?
After wresting power from her husband, Catherine the Great ruled Russia for 34 years, styling herself as the heir to her westernizing grandfather-in-law Peter the Great. In parallel with military campaigns that added large parts of Poland and the Crimean Peninsula to Russia's Empire, the German-born Tsarina waged a cultural offensive, buying Western art by the boatload. The Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace in Summer, from across the Neva River, St Petersburg Photo: Andrey Terebenin With her first acquisition in 1764 -- some 300 canvases earmarked for political rival Frederick the Great of Prussia -- Catherine II founded the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. On the heels of the museum's 250th birthday, over 450 of her art works star in "Masterpieces of the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great" at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia through November 8. Organized by Mikhail Dedinkin, deputy head of the Hermitage's department of Western Read More