Ritratto della duchessa d'Orléans

Vigee Le Brun painted this in 1789, the year everything broke. Her sitter is Louise Marie Adelaide de Bourbon, one of the richest heiresses in France and wife of the Duke of Orleans, the king's cousin who would soon rename himself Philippe Egalite, vote for Louis XVI's death, and then go to the guillotine himself. The painter gave the duchess a melancholy, inward look, dressed in white, her head resting on her raised arm. On her gown she wears a small Wedgwood medallion showing a figure of grief. Vigee Le Brun did not stay to see what came next. As the queen's favorite portraitist she was in real danger, and within months of finishing this she fled France, beginning twelve years of exile that carried her across Europe.