Portrait of Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil

In September 1783 the comte de Vaudreuil had Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro performed in a theatre fitted into the orangery of his country house at Gennevilliers, months after Louis XVI had forbidden it the public stage. The play got that stage anyway in April 1784, and it was in 1784 that Vigee Le Brun painted him. Vaudreuil was her most important private buyer, a courtier attached to the queen's circle through the duchesse de Polignac, and his money came from the family's plantations in Saint-Domingue, where he had been born. Both of them left France in 1789, he within days of the fall of the Bastille, she in October with her daughter. The portrait came to the museum in Richmond as a gift in 1949.