Madame du Barry

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the knees up, a woman stands facing and looking at us with her head tilted a little to our left in this vertical portrait painting. She has pale skin, a heart-shaped face with rosy cheeks, and a rose-pink bow mouth. Thin, arched, sable-brown eyebrows frame her gray eyes. A wreath of pale pink flowers and curling white ostrich feathers crowns her long gray hair, which is piled high on her head. Loose curly tendrils brush both shoulders. Her glowing, silver satin gown is trimmed with delicate sheer lace around the wide, plunging neckline and sleeves, and has a pink sash around her narrow waist. Pearl bracelets adorn her wrists. She leans to her left, our right, to rest her left elbow against a waist-high, cinnamon-brown stone pedestal, which is decorated with a bronze-colored garland and bow on the side facing us. A ring of blue, yellow, red, and pink flowers, woven with strands of ivy, dangles in the hand resting on the pedestal. Her right hand hangs loosely by her side. Along the left edge of the dimly lit background, a tree with a thick trunk angles into the upper left corner. A smaller sapling grows just in front of it. On the right, bushes with olive and fern-green leaves dotted with lilac-purple flecks rise above the pedestal. Dark clouds fill most of the top third of the canvas but they part around her head to reveal the soft blue sky. The artist signed and dated the work in white in the lower right corner, “L. Vigée Le Brun 1782.”