On 31 January, Sotheby's New York auctioned around 41 lots from the 'A Scholar Collects' auction, which primarily included works by French artists of the 18th century.
See also: Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Royal Favorite
Particularly well represented with twelve works was Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, who was an acclaimed portraitist of her time who painted the French nobility, most famously Marie Antoinette. Auction highlights included an early oil portrait of her mother, as well as portraits and landscape studies on paper executed in pastel or chalk.
See also: A History of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun's Portraits of Marie Antoinette
Vigée-Le Brun's Self-Portrait in Traveling Costume was offered with the highest estimate of the auction ($700,000-1 million). The exquisite work (arguably the best pastel in Vigée-Le Brun's oeuvre) was last offered on the auction market more than forty years ago. It was created in Rome, where the artist had fled from the French Revolution with her daughter Julie at the end of 1789. It was not the first self-portrait that Vigée-Le Brun executed in Italy; she had previously received a commission for one in Florence, which was to be added to the local collection of self-portraits in the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi. She gave the pastel to François Guillaume Ménageot, the director of the Académie de France in Rome, who had supported her when she arrived there.
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All of Vigée-Le Brun's works sold at auction, with the self-portrait far exceeding its estimate at $3.085 million (about £2.4 million) and setting a new record for a work on paper by an Old Master.
See also: The Fascinating Political History Behind An Indian Ambassador's Portrait
Since 2019, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun has secured a place as the most expensive female Old Master on the auction market, after her 1788 portrait of the Indian envoy Muhammad Dervish Khan was auctioned at Sotheby's for $7.2 million.
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