La duchessa di Berry in abito di velluto blu

When Vigee Le Brun painted this in 1824 she was nearly 70 and had lived through the lot: the court of Marie Antoinette, the Revolution, long years of exile, and now a Bourbon king back on the French throne. Her sitter, Marie-Caroline, Duchess of Berry, had come through her own shock. Four years earlier her husband, a nephew of the king and a possible heir, had been stabbed to death by a lone attacker on the steps of the Paris Opera. She was carrying their child at the time, and the son born months after his father's murder was hailed across royalist France as a kind of miracle. Vigee Le Brun sets the young widow in blue velvet against a sky full of weather, the storm held just behind her shoulder.