This is my ideal of painting style. That’s why I had to show not one, but two, details. This is pretty much the way I’d like to paint. However, I will have to start painting outdoors to do that.
Often portraits don’t look like people you could really meet and talk to. This woman invites me to know her, maybe because her gaze is so direct. She’s pensive; she’s a bit agitated, maybe in a quandary. Of course if we met, I’d have to ignore her strange triangular hairdo and not comment. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what’s bothering her.
These styles ought definitely to make a comeback, in my opinion. Not just the silks and laces, but the long hair and the goatees. Maybe the problem with goatees these days is that there is never long, fair hair and laces to go with them.

An Allegory of Air — Jan Bruegel the Younger, with either Henryk van Balen I or Henryk van Balen II, ca. 1630-1635
“Jan Brueghel the Younger belonged to the famous Brueghel dynasty. After his esteemed father, Jan the Elder, died, Jan took over the running of his father’s studio. While the Brueghels were sought after for their landscapes and floral arrangements, their collaborators, the van Balens, were renowned for their figures. It was common practice at that time for artists to specialize and to cooperate on paintings. The van Balen and the Brueghel families were on intimate personal terms, had their houses and workshops on the same street, and paintings would be transported from the Brueghel studio to the van Balen workshop, where the figures would be added….The picture is rich in the kind of symbolic imagery that enjoyed tremendous popularity in the seventeenth century The central figure, set against a pastoral landscape, personifies Earth and accepts the ample harvest that is lifted up to a table in the clouds where the gods of Olympus are feasting. Some are identifiable by their attributes — Zeus with his eagle, Neptune holding his trident, Athena in armor holding a spear and a shield decorated with the serpent-haired head of Medusa, and Ceres, goddess of agriculture, wearing a crown made of ears of grain.”
The write-up supplied by the Museum both explains the painting and portrays the Brueghels and van Balens trundling their paintings back and forth to each other’s studios so they could work on them cooperatively. I like the fact that artist’s studios in the 17th Century were workshops: there were the masters and apprentices and sons, maybe daughters….It’s not like they were factories for hotel art, but I love artists working together on creative projects. Maybe there were fights too….
I think a painting of a Dutch girl of the 17th Century looks exactly like a painting of a Finnish girl without make-up of any century, especially the 21st.
Orientalism, the romantic and exotic portrayal of life in the East, influenced the arts and writing of Western Culture in the 18th and especially the 19th Centuries, as trade and colonial campaigns increased in the East. It is an intrinsically Imperialistic perspective, despite its beauty, because it contrasted with the enlightened West. Many painters traveled in the East in order to gather material and better acquaint themselves with their subjects, but orientalist paintings are often the products of imagination, “mixing incongruous architectural and ethnographic elements.” The color and light are irresistible.
I have to say that I always love the Orientalist paintings I see in museums. It’s not because the secret and separate life of women holds any fascination, as it did for the male painters who portrayed it as sensual, luxurious and full of languor. Actually the very idea of life in a harem makes my brain freeze with revulsion. They must have been so bored! However, Orientalism was at its height when naturalistic realism was at its height in the painting of the 19th Century. I love the way they’re painted.
Here’s what became of it:
Madame Le Brun, as she was called, is noteworthy in that she was accepted into the French Academie. She was married to an artist and art dealer and was a successful and productive painter all her life, despite the French Revolution, which interrupted her career.. It’s so nice to be able to contemplate a woman artist who did not wind up compromised in some way.
As a painter at the court of Louis XIV, Vigée Le Brun would paint more than thirty portraits of the queen and her family, leading to her being commonly viewed as the official portraitist of Marie Antoinette. Vigée Le Brun helped to improve Marie Antoinette’s image by painting portraits that included her children and worked towards making her more relatable to the public, in hopes to counter the bad press and judgement the queen had recently received.
After the arrest of the French monarchs, she and her daughter traveled in Italy, Austria and Russia.
In Russia, she was received by the nobility and painted numerous aristocrats, including the last king of Poland, Stanislaw August Poniatowski (Catherine’s nicest lover), and members of the family of Catherine the Great. Although the French aesthetic was widely admired in Russia, there remained various cultural differences as to what was deemed acceptable: bare arms on girls in portraits, for example. Catherine herself agreed to sit herself for Vigée Le Brun (although she died of a stroke before this work was due to begin).
All this Russianizing resulted in her daughter, Julia, marrying a Russian nobleman, not to Le Brun’s great glee.
After a sustained campaign by her ex-husband and other family members to have her name removed from the list of counter-revolutionary émigrés, Vigée Le Brun was finally able to return to France during the reign of Emperor Napoleon I. In spite of being no longer labeled as émigrée, her relationship with the new regime was never totally harmonious, as might be expected given that she was a strong royalist and the former portraitist of Marie Antoinette.
Much in demand by the élite of Europe, she visited England at the beginning of the 19th century and painted the portrait of several British notables, including Lord Byron as a teenager.
Still very active with her painting in her fifties, she purchased a house in Louveciennes Ile-de-France, and lived there until the house was seized by the Prussian Army during the war in 1814. She stayed in Paris until her death on 30 March 1842 when her body was taken back to Louveciennes and burie…near her old home.