Élisabeth Louise Vigée, future celebrated portraitist, was born in Paris, France, on 16 April 1755.
Élisabeth Louise Vigée was born on 16 April 1755 in Paris, the daughter of Louis Vigée, a modestly successful portrait pastellist, and Jeanne Maissin, a hairdresser. From early childhood she showed a precocious talent for drawing, reportedly sketching on the margins of her school books and the walls of her convent dormitory.
Her father recognized her gift and encouraged her artistic education, introducing her to fellow painters and giving her access to his studio and materials before his early death when she was only twelve. This early exposure to the milieu of working Parisian artists, rather than formal academic training reserved largely for men, shaped the resourceful, largely self-taught path she would follow.
Her birth into a modest artisan family, rather than the aristocracy, makes her subsequent rise to become the official portraitist of Queen Marie Antoinette and one of the most sought-after painters in Europe all the more historically remarkable. In an era when women were almost entirely excluded from formal academic art training and professional painting careers, her birth marks the starting point of a life that would challenge and ultimately help redefine the boundaries of what a woman artist could achieve in eighteenth-century Europe.