Joseph Vernet

When Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun made this portrait in 1778, she was barely 23 and painting the man who had helped make her. Claude Joseph Vernet was one of the most admired marine and landscape painters in France, and he had befriended her when the official academies were largely closed to women. His advice was plain: don't follow the system of any one school, study the Italian and Flemish masters, and above all paint from nature, the best teacher of all. She shows him half-length against a bare grey ground, palette and brushes in hand, dressed like a working artist rather than a courtier. A few years on she would be portraying Marie Antoinette. Her painting of Vernet reached the Louvre in 1817.