Death in Paris

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun died on 30 March 1842 at her residence, 99 Rue Saint-Lazare in Paris, at the age of 86. By the time of her death, she had outlived the ancien régime she once served, the Revolution that exiled her, and the Napoleonic and Restoration eras during which she continued to paint and publish.

Her death marked the close of an extraordinary seventy-year career that spanned some of the most turbulent decades in European history. She had painted over 660 portraits and around 200 landscapes, worked in royal courts across France, Italy, Austria, Russia, and Germany, and became one of the very few women of her century to achieve financial independence and international fame purely through her own artistic labor.

She was buried at Louveciennes, near Paris, where a modest gravestone still marks her resting place. In the decades following her death, her reputation waned somewhat as academic art history of the nineteenth century tended to sideline women painters, but the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen a significant critical reappraisal, including a major 2015–2016 retrospective at the Grand Palais and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the first substantial monographic exhibition dedicated to a woman painter at either institution.

Her memoirs, Souvenirs, remain an invaluable primary-source account of court life, artistic practice, and the experience of exile during the French Revolution, ensuring her enduring legacy as both artist and chronicler of her age.