The Child Through the Eyes of the Mother: Vigée Le Brun and Sally Mann’s Exploration of Motherhood5/10/2017 “Come, Sir, and admire Madame Lebrun… I walked over; I caught a glimpse of a charming head. Maternal Tenderness animated it, but love shone in her eyes. My soul, gently moved, caused a smile of admiration and pleasure to appear on my lips. Never had a more delicious feeling touched me or offered me a more agreeable sensation” (1)
During one of her visits in 1792 to the home of her friend and Italian engraver, Carlo Antonio Porporati, Le Brun created Julie as a Bather. The artist was heavily attached to her only child, and a combination of her possessiveness and Julie’s stubbornness led to their strained relationship. It is telling to view Julie in the way she is seen through her protective mother’s eyes in Julie as a Bather, in which the young girl is rendered vulnerable and defenseless against an unforeseen intruder. Le Brun based her painting on the iconography and composition of Porporati’s 1773 Acadèmie royal reception piece, an engraving after Jean Baptiste Santerre’s Susannah (1704, Louvre) (4). In the 18th century, the story of Susannah being spied upon by the Elders while bathing was secularized, and served as a basis from which Le Brun painted her daughter’s portrait. Le Brun’s interpretation of the story of Susannah differs from Porporati’s engraving in several important ways, which reveal Le Brun’s maternal bias toward the subject. From Porporati’s engraving, Le Brun chose to leave out the voyeuristic Elders as well as any architectural indicators of setting. Le Brun’s image of Julie as Susannah features Julie alone in a void of dense foliage, thrust forth into illumination by the startling approach of an unseen intruder. Le Brun’s depiction of Julie is slightly sexualized by Julie’s defensive clutch of fabric to her skin. The subtraction of all other figures and environmental elements elevates the urgency of the scene. Viewers see only the wary look in Julie’s eyes, and are denied a solution to this mystery. Due to this, a strong sense of the artist’s empathy for the subject pervades the painting. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun Julie as a Bather 1792 Oil on canvas Private collection Julie as a Bather exemplifies Le Brun’s evolution as an artist. Up until the early 1780’s, Le Brun often worked with pastel, the medium which she first mastered. These early works are characterized by an opaque, chalky, pale coloring. In 1781, Le Brun’s experience touring the collections of Rubens in Flanders led her to modify her working methods (5). Le Brun expanded her technique by building up the pictorial surface with even layers of paint, lending an enamel-like quality to the canvas. Minute details in color tones were carefully added in superimposed layers of colored glazes. Due to her interaction with the work of Rubens in Flanders, Le Brun’s paintings began to reflect a bolder, brighter color palette, while retaining the softness of her earlier pastel work. In Julie as a Bather, Le Brun enlivens the scene by painting Julie’s lips a healthy, natural red with a hair ribbon to match. Julie’s skin glows with a luminescence achieved by the artist’s new technique of layering colored glazes for modeling flesh tone subtleties (6). This gives the visual effect of light truly emanating from the girl, suggesting her innocence and purity. The lines forming Julie’s figure blur slightly against the background, surrounding her in a haze of curious ethereality. Le Brun’s use of light is instrumental in the illumination of Julie’s angelic features. Julie is bathed in bold white light, setting her in opposition to the dark background. Her scantily covered figure is exposed in the direct (and seemingly unexpected) light, while the background remains mysterious and unrevealing. Le Brun’s use of lighting, bold color, and blurred lines effectively portray Julie as how a mother sees her child: pure, vulnerable, and miraculously beautiful. Sally Mann has been working as a professional photographer since the early 1970s. Immediate Family, Mann’s series of photographs of her children in their home in Virginia, brought her widespread recognition after its publication in 1992 (7). This body of work explores youth and innocence, motherhood, childhood, and the intimacies of family life at home. The spontaneity and innocence of childhood are consistently portrayed as Mann routinely photographed her children completely nude, as seen in Immediate Family as well as he 1984-1981 series Family Pictures. Mann broke taboo by photographing her children in an exposed, even sexualized style. However, Mann simply documented what every mother is used to seeing on a daily basis, and elevated these familiar images into meaningful commentaries on childhood. Through the camera lens, Mann captured her children doing what children do: running around naked and carefree, jumping into water, playing dress-up, etc. Her candid shots transform familiar scenes of childhood into keen observations of her own maternal sentimentality. Selected photographs from Sally Mann's series Immediate Family and Family Pictures, 1984-1991 The works of Vigée Le Brun and Sally Mann reflect a shared artistic sensitivity towards themes of motherhood and childhood. Most notable is the likeness of Mann’s Modest Child #1 (1990) to Le Brun’s Julie as a Bather. The compositions of these two portraits of the artists’ daughters are remarkably similar. Modest Child #1 features Mann’s youngest daughter, Virginia, naked and covering her chest with her hands. In both works, the subject’s expression warns of an unwelcome intrusion into their space. Virginia’s eyes are focused on an unseen source, with her brows furrowed in what could almost be annoyance. Mann isolates her subject from the background in a similar but more extreme way than Le Brun’s treatment of Julie in Julie as a Bather. A soft, diffused light illuminates Virginia’s form, intentionally contrasting her against a dark, empty background. Mann captures her daughter completely exposed and susceptible to harm, despite her insufficient attempt to cover herself; however, the staged quality of the photo eases fears for the child’s safety, since we know her mother was present behind the camera lens. When viewing Mann’s portraits of her children in the nude, such as Modest Child #1, one is able to sense the observant and intensely sentimental maternal force behind the camera. Sally Mann and Vigée Le Brun have chosen to elevate their children to the status of high art, angelic beings worthy of being portrayed in their most natural states. The portraits done of their daughters, Julie as a Bather and Modest Child #1 boast the young girls’ innocent beauty with their enormous and clearly expressive eyes. These portraits reveal the profound, invested tenderness with which Le Brun and Mann envision their daughters and draw deeply personal inspiration from.
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