"Portrait of Madame du Barry" is a painting by French artist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun.
Jeanne Bécu, comtesse du Barry was the last Maîtresse-en-titre of Louis XV of France and one of the victims of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Jeanne... Bécu was born at Vaucouleurs, in the Meuse department in Lorraine, France. She was the illegitimate daughter of Anne Bécu, a woman of enticing beauty, whose occupation was a seamstress. Her kitchen and bedroom were also mentioned to describe a means of measly income for mother and daughter. Jeanne's father was possibly Jean Baptiste Gormand de Vaubernier, a friar known as 'frère Ange.' During her childhood, one of her mother's acquaintances , Monsieur Billard-Dumonceaux, and possibly father of Jeanne's half- brother Claude took both Anne and three-year-old Jeanne into his care when they traveled from Vaucouleurs to Paris and installed Anne as a cook in his Italian mistress' household. Little Jeanette was well liked by Dumonceaux's mistress Francesca , who pampered her in all luxury.more
Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a French painter, and is recognized as the most important female painter of the 18th century. Her style is generally considered Rococo and shows interest in the subject of neoclassical painting. Vigée Le Brun cannot be considered a pure Neoclassist, however, in that she creates mostly portraits in Neoclassical dress rather than the History painting. In her choice of color and style while serving... as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette, Vigée Le Brun is purely Rococo. Born in Paris on 16 April 1755, Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Vigée was the daughter of a portraitist and fan painter, Louis Vigée, from whom she received her first instruction. Her mother was a hairdresser. She was sent to live with relatives in Épernon until the age of 6 when she entered a convent where she remained for five years. Her father died when she was 12 years old following an infection from surgery to remove a fish bone lodged in his throat. In 1768, her mother married a wealthy jeweler, Jacques-Francois Le Sèvre and the family moved to the rue Saint-Honoré close to the Palais Royal.more
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has collections of more than 227,000 objects that include "world-class holdings of European and American paintings, prints, drawings and decorative arts" and is among the largest art museums in the United States. Its main building is located at the west end of Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, near the south end of Fairmount Park and is visited by more than 800,000 people annually. Other museum sites... include the Rodin Museum, also located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Perelman Building, across the street from the Main Building, and several other historic sites. The Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building opened in 2007 and houses some of the Museum's more popular collections, as well as over 200,000 books and periodicals and 1.6 million other documents. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park. Originally called the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, and housed in the Centennial Exposition's Memorial Hall, it opened its doors to the public on May 10, 1877.more