Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a French portrait painter who became the favored painter of Queen Marie Antoinette and one of the most successful women artists of the eighteenth century, admitted to the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris in 1783 despite the institution's strict limit on female members. Her elegant, warmly lit portraits, rendered in a refined Rococo-influenced style, captured the French court in the years before the Revolution, after which she fled France and built an extraordinarily successful international career painting aristocracy and royalty across Italy, Austria, Russia, and Britain. Vigée Le Brun produced roughly six hundred portraits and thirty landscapes over her career and left a detailed set of memoirs describing her life as a professional woman artist in an era that offered few such careers.