Lady Hamilton (1761–1815), as a Bacchante

Vigee Le Brun painted this in exile. As Marie Antoinette's favorite portraitist she had fled Paris the night the Revolution turned dangerous, in October 1789, and spent the next years moving from court to court across Europe. In Naples the elderly British envoy Sir William Hamilton hired her to paint his young mistress, Emma Hart, a blacksmith's daughter from the Wirral who had remade herself into a celebrated beauty. Emma poses as a bacchante, a follower of the wine god, dancing with a tambourine, her chestnut hair loose. Behind her smokes Vesuvius, which Hamilton could watch from his villa outside the city. Emma would marry him the next year and, later still, become the mistress of Admiral Nelson. She built the pose from the ancient vases Hamilton collected.