Vigée Le Brun died in Paris at age 86, closing a remarkable career of over 600 portraits and international acclaim.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun died on 30 March 1842 at her residence at 99 rue Saint-Lazare in Paris, at the age of 86 — an extraordinarily long life and career by the standards of her era, spanning the last years of the Ancien Régime, the entirety of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period, and into the July Monarchy.
By the time of her death, she had produced an estimated 660 portraits and around 200 landscapes over a career of more than six decades, an output nearly unmatched by any of her male or female contemporaries. Her sitters had included queens, empresses, aristocrats, and leading cultural figures across France, Italy, Austria, Russia, and England, making her one of the most internationally traveled and celebrated portrait painters in European history.
Her death marked the passing of one of the last major artistic links to the vanished world of Ancien Régime court culture, having personally known and painted Marie Antoinette and having witnessed firsthand the collapse and aftermath of the French monarchy. In her final years, she had published her memoirs, Souvenirs, providing historians with an invaluable firsthand account of court life, artistic practice, and the tumultuous political events she lived through.
Vigée Le Brun's legacy endured well beyond her lifetime; she is remembered today as one of the preeminent portrait painters of the eighteenth century and one of relatively few women to achieve major institutional recognition and lasting art-historical prominence from that era, with her works held in the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and other major collections worldwide.