Caroline Murat with her daughter Letizia

Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun had been Marie Antoinette's portraitist. She left France in October 1789 with her small daughter and did not come back for 12 years. In 1806 the commission that reached her was for the youngest sister of the man now ruling the country, Caroline Murat, painted here with her eldest child Letizia, born in 1802. The sittings went badly. Caroline missed appointment after appointment, kept the painter waiting in Paris most of a summer, and arrived with her hair dressed differently from one session to the next, so the face had to be scraped back and done again. Vigee Le Brun said within earshot that real princesses had never treated her like that, and she was paid around half her usual price. The year after this was finished, Caroline Murat became Queen of Naples.