Portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne on Cape Misenum

Germaine de Stael was among the sharpest writers in France, and Napoleon could not stand her, so he banished her from Paris. She held court instead at Coppet, her family chateau on Lake Geneva, which became a magnet for Europe's exiled writers. There, around 1808, she had Vigee Le Brun paint her not as herself but as Corinne, the improvising poet-heroine of her own hugely popular novel. She holds a lyre, eyes lifted, caught mid-inspiration on a headland near Naples. The painter, herself long a wanderer after fleeing the Revolution, had devoured the book before arriving. De Stael was not fully happy with the result and refused to show it at the Paris Salon or have it engraved. The Bay of Naples behind her belongs to an Italy she had toured and written into the novel.