marthajefferson:Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie, details, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1786) In 178
marthajefferson:Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie, details, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1786) In 1787, when Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun debuted her latest self-portrait at the prestigious Paris Salon, the Salon was appalled. A scandal. In it, her lips are parted in a demure smile as she cradles her young daughter, effusing maternal intimacy. The scandal? Her teeth. Indeed, the self-portrait of the painter with her daughter Julie is the very first real smile of Western art where the teeth are seen. Since Antiquity, representations of mouths with teeth exist in art, but always in a negative or subversive light: subjects unable to control their emotions (fear, rage, ecstasy) or for genre paintings, irreverent images, etc. It was certainly not intended for classic portraits of the ‘upper class’, or a refashioning of Mother and Child, one of the oldest motifs in the Western canon. “The painting shocked because it ignored rules about facial representation,” explains historian Colin Jones. “The idea of the smile with the teeth showing was not exactly new, but to have Madame Vigée-Le Brun actually identified with this simple gesture is seen as throwing away the rulebook of Western art.” One contemporary journalist wrote that Vigée-Le Brun’s display of teeth was “an affectation which artists, connoisseurs, and people of good taste are unanimous in condemning”—a fervor representative of the controversies that filled the French painter’s life. As Jones notes: “Louise Vigée-Le Brun liked breaking conventions.” -- source link
#elisabeth vigee-lebrun#history#18th century