Vigée Le Brun
Vigée Le Brun was trained in art by her father, Louis Vigée, a member of the Academy of St. Luke, a Parisian guild of painters and sculptors. Vigée specialized in oil painting and pastel portraits, which became his daughter’s preferred artistic media. Vigée Le Brun exhibited a natural inclination toward art at a young age, an aptitude her father delightedly nurtured, exclaiming, “You will be a painter, my child, if there ever was one,” upon seeing her first sketches.
Vigée Le Brun’s father passed away when she was only 12 years old. By the time she was 15, Vigée Le Brun was earning enough money from portrait painting to provide for herself, her younger brother, and her widowed mother. After a couple decades of great success during which her social, artistic, and political life blossomed, Vigée Le Brun’s public visibility increased so much that she was forced to flee Paris at the dawn of the French Revolution.
Grecian Nostalgia
“Portrait of a Woman,” painted in 1803, is a product of Vigée Le Brun’s time exiled in England. A young woman rests against a stone parapet at sunset, gazing wistfully into the distance. She wears Grecian-inspired ochre drapery over a gauzy crêpe blouse, her sleeves cinched with a gold ring. Honey-toned ringlets frame her forehead while a rich midnight blue veil envelopes the rest of her hair. The veil’s texture appears simultaneously velvety and chiffony, matching the color of the tasseled band overlaying the ochre drapery at the woman’s chest.
Encapsulating an Era
Ivan Kramskoi (1837–1887) was a Russian oil painter and art critic who was born into a poor family of the petite bourgeoisie. He studied at the prestigious St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, which promoted the neoclassical painting style.
By 1883, the year he painted “Portrait of an Unknown Woman,” Kramskoi was at the height of his career. When first exhibited, the painting created quite the sensation, leading to lots of speculation about the sitter’s identity, particularly her vocation.
In response, Kramskoi commented: “Some people have said it is not known who this woman is. Is she decent, or does she sell herself? But within her is an entire epoch.” The enigmatic reputation of the painting only grew with time, as Kramskoi’s letters and diaries revealed no mention of the woman in the painting.
In an open carriage riding along Nevsky Prospect, the main street in St. Petersburg, sits a woman wearing a black fur coat, leather gloves, and a velvet hat with ostrich feathers. Anichkov Palace is visible behind her. Rather than the contemplative, faraway gaze of the woman in Vigée Le Brun’s painting, the woman in Kramskoi’s painting looks directly at the viewer with a penetrating, confident stare. The perspective of the composition positions viewers beneath the sitter’s eye level, as if we were walking alongside the elevated carriage and must crane our necks to look upon her.
Textural details in the foreground of the painting are rendered in incredibly high detail, such as the deep-buttoned leather upholstery of the carriage seat, the satiny sheen of the ribbon at the woman’s neck, the pearls and riot of ostrich feathers lining the brim of her hat, the reflection of the beads at her wrist, and the tufts of animal fur lining her coat. Even her eyelashes are painted with extreme attention to detail, her eyes’ waterline sensitively adorned with thin streaks of white paint, elevating the lifelike quality of her eyes.
In contrast, the painting’s background is rendered with much less clarity, and with a much more muted and light color palette. This contrast between saturated, dark, detailed foreground and subdued, light background serves to draw more attention to the woman’s face. The sky is a pale butter yellow, suggesting that it’s sunset on a snowy winter’s eve, which would explain the blush in the woman’s cheeks. The reflected light on her face is also clarified by the setting: with snow blanketing the streets, sunlight reflects all over, illuminating the woman’s face from below.
A testament to Kramskoi’s comment on there being an entire epoch within her, “Portrait of an Unknown Woman” has been used as the cover for various editions of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” Valerie Hillings, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, said of the woman in Kramskoi’s painting: “Many people just think she’s sort of like Anna Karenina. She has that kind of special feel, that special Russianness.”
Enigmatic Expressions
Much lore surrounds Italian High Renaissance artist and polymath Leonardo da Vinci’s small, unfinished poplar wood panel nicknamed “La Scapigliata” in Italian, or “The Lady with Dishevelled Hair.” Painted in umber, oil, and white lead pigments, the subject, history, and purpose of the panel remains shrouded in mystery.
In any case, the mystery surrounding the painting’s purpose matches the mystifying quality of the woman’s expression. With a soft, barely visible smile similar to that of the “Mona Lisa,” the woman looks oblivious to the world around her, certainly unaware of the world of the viewer. In keeping with his signature technique of paint application, Leonardo uses sfumato (technique of softening the transitions between forms) to blend the features of the woman’s face, creating gently rolling forms with subtle gradations.
An unfinished backdrop brings out the sfumato’s elegance even more. The woman’s tousled curls are barely massed in, their character and arrangement framing her face hinted at by sparse, dry brush strokes. Her shoulders and neck, like her hair, are but two umber brushstrokes, and the rest of the panel is primed but unpainted.
