Works by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun painted Marie Antoinette and won the patronage of aristocrats across Europe, and she often draped her sitters in shawls and long scarves in place of the High Rococo fashions she disliked.

Her father, the portraitist Louis Vigée, gave her first lessons, and by her early teens she painted portraits for money. After seeing the Flemish masters in 1781 she made Self Portrait in a Straw Hat as a free take on a Rubens: a feathered hat with red and blue flowers, open sky behind, palette in hand. Her Self-portrait with Her Daughter, Julie, the child clasped to her, caused a small scandal at the Salon of 1787: she smiles with her lips apart.

She painted Marie Antoinette and the royal family more than thirty times, and in 1783 the queen pressed Louis XVI to force the royal Académie to admit her. Marie Antoinette and Her Children of 1787 was meant to bring the queen closer to her subjects: she sits in red velvet with a baby on her lap while her son points to an empty cradle, a sign of the child she had lost.

The Revolution drove her abroad, to Italy, Vienna and, from 1795 to 1801, Russia; she came home in 1802. In Vienna she painted Princess Karoline von Liechtenstein as Iris flying barefoot through cloud in a plain Roman-style gown under a streaming yellow scarf, which scandalised the princess's relatives. In Switzerland in 1807 and 1808 she drew in pastel, which her father had taught her: View of the Lake of Challes and Mont Blanc sets golden trees by a still lake under the white peaks.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Louvre, National Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Liechtenstein Museum, Musée de l'Histoire de France.