Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) was a celebrated French painter at the turn of the nineteenth century and one of few women artists admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. She is well known for her portraits of the aristocracy and royal families, including her patron Marie Antoinette. She had contributed more than fifty pictures to the Salons, including history paintings and allegories, by 1789. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, she fled Paris and traveled across Europe and Russia, continuing to paint. Vigée Le Brun returned to Paris in 1802, and in 1825, settled in Louveciennes, she set out writing and publishing her memoir.