Ritratto della contessa di Baussancourt

Vigee Le Brun painted this in 1830, when she was 75 and near the end of a very long working life. She had survived the Revolution that scattered her royal clients, years of exile across Europe, and the fall of Napoleon, and had come home to a France on its third kind of government since her youth. Here she sets down a bust of the young Comtesse de Baussancourt on a wood panel, quietly, without the theatrical settings of her grand years. The soft handling and gentle light are the same ones that had made her the most sought-after portraitist in Europe half a century earlier. In her last years she put down the brush and took up the pen, writing memoirs of the sitters and courts she had outlived.