Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

In 1778, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, a 23-year-old Parisian portraitist trained largely by her own father before his early death, was summoned to Versailles to paint the 22-year-old queen, Marie Antoinette. It began a decade in which she painted the queen roughly 30 times, in formal state robes, in a plain muslin dress that briefly scandalized the court for looking too simple for a queen, and surrounded by her children.

That closeness to the queen turned dangerous once the Revolution began. On 6 October 1789, the same day a Paris crowd marched the king, Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace, Vigee Le Brun left the city in the opposite direction, traveling in a public coach dressed as an ordinary working woman with her young daughter Julie, to avoid being recognized as the queen's painter.

She did not return to France for twelve years. In that time she worked her way through the courts of Italy, Austria, Russia and elsewhere, painting nobility whose language she often did not speak, supporting herself and her daughter entirely on portrait commissions, and getting elected to art academies in cities including Rome and St Petersburg along the way, a rare honor for a woman painter of that period. She was finally allowed back into France in 1802, by which point she had produced several hundred portraits across half of Europe.