Portrait of Countess Kagenek as Flora

Vigee Le Brun had been Marie Antoinette's favourite portraitist, which in 1789 made Paris a dangerous place for her. She fled the Revolution with her young daughter and spent years working her way across Europe, and by 1792, the very year her name was entered on the official list of emigres, she had reached Vienna. There she painted this young Viennese countess as Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and spring, with blossoms in her hair and a soft landscape behind her. Even in exile the fashionable French court style travelled with the painter who made it. She signed the canvas plainly: at Vienna, 1792.