Self-portrait

This was painted in 1781, eight years before the Revolution, in a France where a woman could reach the top of portrait painting and still be shut out of its official academy. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was about 26 and already the favourite painter of Marie-Antoinette, yet the Académie Royale would not admit her until 1783, and then only after the queen pressed for it. Rather than show herself at work with palette and brushes, she paints a fashionable young woman of society, in a plain muslin gown and a scheme of white, black and cherry, her hair falling in loose curls. That informal muslin was the same relaxed dress in which she liked to portray her aristocratic sitters, the queen among them.