Portrait of Marie-Louise-Adélaïde-Jacquette de Robien

The signature at the lower left reads Mademoiselle Vigee, 1774. That was the year the authorities sealed her Paris studio, because she had been earning a living as a painter without belonging to any of the guilds that licensed the trade, and the Royal Academy did not admit women. She applied instead to the Academie de Saint-Luc, an older body her father had belonged to, and was received on 25 October 1774. She was 19. The sitter, Marie-Louise de Robien, was a year younger and came from the Breton nobility. She holds a guitar and wears no jewellery, none of the apparatus a court portrait of the period would have carried. Four years later the painter was called to Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette. Her sitter married in 1788 and so became the sister-in-law of the comte de Mirabeau, the orator who dominated the first year of the Revolution.