Lady Hamilton as a Sibyl

By 1791 Vigee Le Brun was an exile. She had been Marie Antoinette's favorite portraitist, and when the Revolution turned dangerous in 1789 she slipped out of France and worked her way down through Italy. In Naples she met Emma Hart, a blacksmith's daughter from England who had become the companion, and that autumn the wife, of the elderly British envoy Sir William Hamilton. Emma was famous around the city for her Attitudes, striking silent poses as figures from antiquity to entertain guests after dinner. Vigee painted her here as a sibyl, an ancient prophetess, a part that fit a woman who performed the classical past for a living. The picture pleased its maker enough that she kept a version by her, carrying it through the courts of Europe and on to Russia as proof of what she could do.