Madame Rousseau et sa fille

1789 is the year everything cracked in France, and Vigee Le Brun had reason to feel it more than most. She was Marie Antoinette's favourite portraitist, tied by her whole career to a court that was about to fall. In the middle of that she was still doing what she did best, an intimate portrait of a mother drawing her daughter close, warm and unhurried, with none of the fear outside in it. That October, as the royal family was marched from Versailles to Paris, she gathered her own small daughter and slipped out of France. She would paint her way across Europe for 12 years before she saw home again.