Portrait of Madame d'Aguesseau

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun painted this in the early 1770s, which means she made it as a teenager. She was largely self-taught, and already so busy taking portrait commissions from fashionable Paris that the authorities seized her studio for a time, since she was working for pay without belonging to the painters' guild. She soon joined a guild, married an art dealer, and within a decade was the favourite portraitist of Marie Antoinette. All of that is still ahead of her here. The sitter belongs to the d'Aguesseau family, one of the great legal dynasties of France, whose most famous member had served as chancellor to the king. This is the kind of polished society likeness she was already turning out for pay before she was twenty.