Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) became the most celebrated portrait painter of 18th-century France and the official artist to Queen Marie Antoinette. Born in Paris, she was the daughter of a pastel portraitist who encouraged her artistic talents from childhood. Her style blended the grace and elegance of the declining Rococo period with the composure of emerging Neoclassicism. She painted more than 30 portraits of the Queen and her family, including the controversial "Marie-Antoinette in a Muslin Dress" (1783), which sparked scandal at the Salon for its informal attire. Her later "Marie Antoinette and her Children" (1787) attempted to rehabilitate the Queen's public image by showing her as a devoted mother.

Vigée Le Brun joined the Académie de Saint-Luc in 1774 and was appointed official artist to Marie Antoinette four years later. Thanks largely to the queen's influence, she gained admission to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1783, despite rules limiting female membership. When the Revolution erupted in 1789, she fled France and spent 12 years abroad, painting portraits and moving through society in Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. She was elected to art academies in ten cities across Europe. Contemporary artists like Joshua Reynolds viewed her as one of the greatest portraitists of the age. By her own count, she painted around 900 pictures during her career: some 600 portraits and about 200 landscapes. Her memoirs, published in the 1830s when she was in her eighties, provide a vivid account of artistic life before and after the Revolution. Her work hangs at the Louvre, the Hermitage, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.