One Painting, One Story : Vigee Le Brun’s “Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat”

Useful online lecture from the National Gallery looking in detail at the life of Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun the gallery’s self-portrait of her.

Jacqui Ansell, an expert on historic dress, interviewed Lucy Davies, author of a new book on this picture for the National Gallery, and they outlined Le Brun’s exciting life story from being an untaught artist to court painter before having to flee Paris in the Revolution and travelling around Europe.

They discussed how Le Brun saw Ruben’s “Le Chappeau de Paille” which is also in the National Gallery, when she visited Antwerp with her art dealer husband, and how she based her self-portrait on it. They also looked at other self-portraits by her and discussed how and why she liked to depict herself.

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