Portrait of Countess Maria Theresia Bucquoi, née Parr (1746-1818)

Vigee Le Brun left Paris on the night of 6 October 1789, in a public coach, travelling with her small daughter and a governess under an assumed name. She had been Marie Antoinette's portrait painter and understood what that had come to be worth. This portrait was made in Vienna in 1793, the year the queen went to the guillotine, and the commission came from the sitter's brother. The countess was 47, married into a Bohemian family, and the painter recorded her as kind and good. The landscape behind her is assembled from two different places, the hills along the Danube and the waterfall at Terni, which Vigee Le Brun had seen during the years in Rome and Naples that preceded Vienna. Her name stayed on the French register of emigres until 1800, when it was struck out, and she came back to Paris two years later.