Porträt der Anna Pitt als Hebe

By 1792 Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun had been on the road for three years. She had been Marie Antoinette's favourite portraitist, and when the Revolution turned dangerous she left Paris in secret, painting her way through Italy and later Vienna and Russia on the strength of her reputation. This portrait comes from those wandering years. She posed the young Englishwoman Anna Pitt as Hebe, the goddess who served the gods their wine, reaching up toward the eagle of Jupiter. It is a light, flattering mythology of the kind that had made her the most sought-after portraitist in Europe. The canvas reached Russia after her, and entered the Hermitage in 1920 from a Russian noble collection.