About Portrait Styles

Look closely at this regal painting of Marie Antoinette, on the left, painted by one of her favorite portrait painters, French artist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. On the right, another favorite French artist of Marie Antoinette's was Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, who also painted Marie Antoinette and her children many times. When I first saw this painting of Madame Louisa Elisabeth of France and Son (1788) at Versailles in 1990 by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, which is a huge painting (108 x 63 inches) on the wall of Marie Antoinette's bedroom, I never forgot it. This one painting compelled me to study Marie Antoinette, the French language, the artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, and other French painters. I have been to France 4 times.

The history of Women in Art is represented by many portraits by these two women artists who painted Marie Antoinette.

During its 150-year long history, the Royal Académie of Painting and Sculpture only welcomed four women as full members and two of those painters were Marie Antoinette's favorites. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun were both admitted in 1783.

Historical Portraiture

My formal education was as a painter and photographer. I received formal commercial photography training in 1989-1991. I have a master’s degree in painting, and I returned to painting in 1998. This is even while I learned computer-aided commercial graphics from 1993 to 1995, I began painting on the computer with Adobe Photoshop and did photographic restorations.

A photograph emulating the self-portrait of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard beside Self-Portrait of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard with Two Pupils from the Metropolitian Museum of Art