Peace bringing back Prosperity

Vigee Le Brun was famous as Marie Antoinette's favourite portrait painter, but portraits alone would not get a woman into the Royal Academy. So for her entry piece she reached for a grander, more elevated subject, this allegory of Peace, a calm woman in white gently leading golden Abundance by the hand. She had painted it around 1780 and offered it to the Academy in 1783. Her admission was a fight. Being married to a picture dealer was technically a bar, and some resented a fashionable portraitist trying her hand at history painting at all. She was let in anyway, on the same day as another woman, Adelaide Labille-Guiard, so that the Academy took in two women at once. Within a decade the Revolution had come, the queen she served was dead, and Vigee Le Brun was painting her way across the courts of Europe in exile.