Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun

W.H. Helm, Vigée-Lebrun:  Her Life, Works and Friendships, London (1915?), p. 223;
L. Strachey, trans., Memoirs of Madame Vigée Lebrun, New York 1989, pp. 146-147.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is in fairly complicated condition. There are bubbles in the surface, in the upper left background particularly, which are an indication that the lining needs to be reexamined. The paint layer is extremely dirty. There are areas of lifting paint to the right of the face and in the lower left and lower right corners, and beneath all of this there are very broad and copious amounts of amateurish repainting. This repainting incorporated with the yellow varnished gives one an understandable right to question this picture. However, in the sitter's right eye, in her mouth and in her upper neck, cleaning tests have been made which reveal a healthy and 18th century paint layer, which it is understood indicates that this picture is indeed the work mentioned in the records. This picture represents a commitment from a restorer to carefully yet consistently reexamine every part of the restoration, which includes elements of the background areas in the dress itself, for instance the shoulders on both sides which seem to have been completely repainted. There is no question that there are condition issues yet at the same time this represents an opportunity to recover an important and lost work by the artist.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The present painting represents an exciting rediscovery of a work long-believed to be lost from Vigée Le Brun's oeuvre and only known from a brief mention of it in her Memoirs.¹  Madame Le Brun was arguably the most famous and successful portraitist of her age and certainly a pioneer among female artists.  The favorite painter of Marie Antoinette and her circle, the artist was forced to leave France with her daughter in 1789 due to slanderous attacks on her character and the impending revolution.  She spent the next twelve years working in Italy, Austria, Russia and Germany.  Luckily her reputation for portraying the refinement and grace of the French aristocracy stretched far beyond the borders of France, and she received numerous invitations and commissions from various foreign nobles who held Royalist sympathies.  It is during this period, while living and working in Russia, that she began the present Portrait of Princess Tyufyakina.

In her Memoirs, Vigée Le Brun mentions meeting the Princess at a grand ball given in Moscow by Marshal Soltikoff.  She appears to have been drawn to the young woman because of her beauty, and perhaps also because of her appearance of unhappiness.  As Madame Le Brun comments, "One I especially observed was a young person soon after married to Prince Tufakin [sic].  Her face, whose features were regular and delicate, wore an excessively melancholy expression.  After her marriage I began her portrait, but was only able to finish the head in Moscow, so that I carried off the picture to finish it at St. Petersburg, where, however, I before long heard of the death of that charming young lady.  She was scarcely more than seventeen years old." ²  When Vigée Le Brun met Ekaterina Osipovna Tyufyakina (née Khorvat), she was the toast of Moscow society.  Possessing great beauty and grace, she was the feminine ideal of tzarist Russia.  Although the French painter seems slightly confused about her age -- Tyufyakina was born in 1777, making her twenty-four or twenty-five years of age at her death rather than seventeen -- the Princess did die tragically young and childless.  She was married to Petr Ivanovich Tyufyakin (1769-1845), an important court official, who later served as the Director of the Imperial Theaters from 1819-1821 under Alexander I.

It is unclear whether this was a commissioned portrait, perhaps a marriage present from the groom to his bride, or a work that the artist instigated herself, after being taken with the girl's appearance at the Soltikoff ball.  What we do know is that the portrait was only partially complete when Vigée Le Brun learned of the Princess's death, and that she decided to complete the work by depicting her in the guise of the goddess Iris:  "I painted her as Iris, seated on some clouds, with a billowy scarf about her."³  Interestingly, during her time in Vienna the artist had painted another young woman in the guise of Iris:  Princess Karoline of Liechtenstein.  Now hanging in the Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna (inv. no. GE 1787), the work depicts the Princess soaring through the sky and caused quite a scandal when it was first displayed because of the Princess' bare feet.  In Greek mythology Iris is both the messenger of the gods, and the personification of the rainbow.  Vigée Le Brun's choice of Iris for Tyufyakina's posthumous portrait is very appropriate, as Iris was the goddess who linked heaven and earth:  the daughter of Thaumas, a marine god, and Elektra, a cloud nymph, Iris was charged with replenishing the clouds with life-giving water.  In Vigée's work, Tyufyakina is shown seated on the clouds, holding a diaphanous rainbow-colored veil that arcs over her head, floating on the breeze.  In a description of her use of drapery in her Memoirs, Madame Le Brun writes, "I would arrange large scarves, lightly woven around the body and on the arms, with which I would try to imitate the handsome drapery style of Raphael and Domenichino, in the same way you would have seen in Russia in several of my portraits."⁴  Here, not only does the drapery heighten the beauty and drama of the portrait, as it does in so many of the artist's Russian works, but it also hints at the immortality and timelessness of her tragic young subject.     

It is clear from its current state that this canvas has been heavily restored and overpainted in the centuries since it left Vigée Le Brun's studio.  The thick, discolored varnish and broad areas of overpaint have masked the work's true identity for many years.  Joseph Baillio has only recently connected it to Tyufyakina's heretofore missing portrait (in correspondence and based solely on photographs) and noted that the signature and date appear genuine (fig. 1).  Recent cleaning tests undertaken by Sotheby's have opened windows in the sitter's face, hand and arm that hint at the true appearance of Vigée Le Brun's  work underneath.  In the areas that have been cleaned, the original, clear, bright colors of the artist's palette shine through and one can imagine the iridescent quality of the rainbow that is currently hidden beneath the discolored varnish.  The pinky and ring fingers of her right hand, too, hint at the quality and delicate modeling to be uncovered through a process of thorough and careful restoration.

The present work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the works of Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun by Joseph Baillio.

1.  See Lit., L. Strachey, pp. 146-147.
2.  Ibid.
3.  Ibid., p. 147.
4.  Ibid., p. 22.