Detail of Madame Grand by Vigee Le Brun in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, August 2010

Artist: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, 1755–1842)

Title: Madame Grand (Catherine Noele Worlée, 1762–1835), Later Madame Talleyrand-Périgord, Princesse de Bénévent

Date: 1783

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: Oval, 36 1/4 x 28 1/2 in. (92.1 x 72.4 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Bequest of Edward S. Harkness, 1940

Accession Number: 50.135.2


Gallery Label:

The sitter was born in India and married George Grand, an Englishman in the colonial civil service. After amorous adventures in Calcutta and London, she settled in Paris in 1783, the year this portrait was exhibited at the Salon. She was divorced and in 1802 married the diplomat Talleyrand. Baron Gerard's full-length portrait of her hangs nearby in this gallery with Prud'hon's portrait of Talleyrand himself.

Contemporary descriptions of Madame Grand's Nordic beauty match her appearance here. Her heavenward gaze, reminiscent of the female saints in ecstacy so common in 17th century Baroque painting, and also found in Greuze's "tête d'expression," is somewhat incongruous in the context of a society portrait.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/europe...