Charles-Alexandre de Calonne (1734-1802)

Vigee Le Brun painted Louis XVI's finance minister, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, in 1784, seated at his desk with a letter to the king in hand. The likeness was so alert and so flatteringly observed that Paris gossip decided the painter and her sitter must be lovers. She spent years denying it. In her memoirs she brushed the story off by mocking his old-fashioned wig, saying she could never have fallen for a man who wore one. The rumour did real harm. It fed a wider whisper campaign that this young, hugely successful woman at Marie Antoinette's court was being paid, and kept, in ways a respectable painter should not be. Calonne himself was pushed from office three years later, as France slid toward the financial crisis that would help bring the Revolution.