French artist Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Today, smiles are seen as an indication of friendliness, happiness, or affection. However, for most of recorded art history, artists’ representations of the wide smile were frowned upon. Those grinning in paintings were branded as peasants, imbeciles, or drunks. Smiles were certainly found in scenes of ordinary European life, but many of those subjects fit the bill. Proper ladies and gentleman kept their lips buttoned.

In 18^th-century France, those wealthy enough to pose for a portrait remained tight-lipped. Women with alabaster complexions were painted as emotionless, gauzily draped mythological ideals. Theatrical body gestures were de rigueur, but facial reactions were downplayed.

The scandal of a smile

Then came Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun who aimed to warm those chilly countenances. Born in Paris in 1755, Elisabeth was a precocious painter from an early age, drawing on any available surface, from her notebooks to the walls of her convent school. Her father, a portraitist himself, focused Elisabeth’s talent to the easel, and when he died, the teenager was earning enough from portrait painting to support her small family.

At 20, Elisabeth Vigée married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a painter and an art dealer who provided her with a successful entrée into the Paris art world. Once established as a member of the upper crust of Parisian society, she earned the favour of the Royal Court at Versailles and became the official artist of Queen Marie-Antoinette, who commissioned over 30 portraits.

Vigée Le Brun remained a bit of a bohemian eccentric within Paris society and was regarded as a nouveau riche upstart. However, with the Queen’s help, she was accepted into the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, a very rare achievement for a female painter of the time. During its 150-year-long history, the Académie only welcomed four women as full members: Marie-Thérèse Reboul was admitted in 1757; Anne Vallayer-Coster was admitted in 1770; Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was admitted in 1783 along with Adélaïde Labille-Guiard.

In 1787, Vigée Le Brun caused a small scandal when her Self-Portrait with Daughter Julie was displayed at that year’s Salon, which revealed her smiling and ever-so slightly opened mouth. The Paris Salon, the biennial art exhibition held at the Louvre Palace, was known for setting standards of French, and therefore European, taste. Her small smirk was seen as a violation of conventional painting and sculpting traditions stemming from antiquity.

By smiling on canvas, her unseemly innovation was at odds with the neo-classical conventions of the late 18^th-century, which favoured gravity and reserve. A critic of the time called her smile, “An affectation which artists, art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning, and which finds no precedent among the Ancients.”

The Mémoires Secrets, a gossipy tabloid of the time, went on to say, “this affectation is particularly out of place in a mother.” Vigée Le Brun thought the opposite, and continued to paint in her open and welcoming style; her secret smiles became her signature.

A French revolution in painting

Royal marquises and comtesses showed their smiles on Vigée Le Brun’s canvases, but in portraits of Vigée Le Brun’s patron, Marie Antoinette remained closed mouthed. An earlier 1783 painting of Marie Antoinette drew anger from the officials of the Academie for reasons other than the smile. Vigée Le Brun had repainted the Queen in an unconventional white muslin chemise. A radical departure from what was expected of a queen, the portrait was decried as a depiction of the Marie-Antoinette in her underwear. The portrait was hastily withdrawn and replaced with a similar portrait by Vigée Le Brun of the Queen, wearing more conventional attire

Vigée Le Brun wasn’t the only person of influence who favoured smiling. In 1760, Voltaire, the prodigious writer and enlightened thinker, described what he called the ‘smile of the soul’, saying that the face of a beautiful individual would lack grace if they smiled with their mouths closed. The smile of the soul was found on the faces of the heroines on the pages of the best-selling novels of the Enlightenment-era. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and Rousseau’s Julie from La Nouvelle Heloise, beamed beatifically from their deathbeds. Fiction prized the smile as a symbol of inward and outward beauty. The Parisian elite, brought to tears by these novels, slowly began to approve of smiling.

By 1789, in the months leading up to the French Revolution, her position as an artist to the Queen and her court caused Vigée Le Brun to flee France making her an ‘enemy of the Nation’. The French Revolutionary government would later force her husband to divorce Elisabeth in order to retain their property and the contents of her studio.

During her exile, she traveled to the royal courts of Europe, where she continued to paint the coy smiles of the noblewomen of Russia, Austria and Italy, where in Naples she painted the visiting Emma Hart, who would become Lady Hamilton and the future mistress of Lord Nelson.

The decorative smile championed in the days leading to the French Revolution may have been an emblem of a fairer and happier society in the making. The smile was perhaps more democratic – an antidote to the glum facial fixity associated with academic art. It wasn’t to last. Under the paranoid New Regime, laughing and smiling, were banned in public meetings.

Vigée Le Brun spent 12 years in exile, and on her return to France, she continued to rebel against the popular tradition of sombre faces in portraiture, painting her gently smiling subjects well into the 1800s.

The smile didn’t make a comeback until the late 19^th century, when advances in photography made toothy, white smiles normal in portraits.

Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a radical and key painter of the 18th-century and perhaps, for a while, she taught France how to smile.

Hazel Smith is a freelance writer from Toronto.