Autoportrait

When she painted this in 1790, Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun was already in exile. She had slipped out of Paris the night the Bastille fell, because all of Europe knew her as Marie Antoinette's favourite portraitist, and in the new France that was a liability. In Rome the director of the Uffizi invited her to add her likeness to the gallery's celebrated collection of artists' self-portraits, and she finished it in about a month. She shows herself at the easel in a simple dark dress, palette in hand, brush raised. The face she is sketching in white chalk on the canvas before her is the queen's. Back home the monarchy had a little over two years left, and Marie Antoinette would go to the guillotine in 1793.