At the end of the eighteenth century and during the first three decades of the nineteenth Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was one of the foremost portrait painters.
Elisabeth was mostly self taught and when she was nineteen years old, she became a member of the Académie de Saint-Luc.
Her early success attracted the attention of the foremost dealer in Paris, Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun (1748-1813), whom she married in 1776.
Le Bruns lived on an opulent scale. The artist’s stylish salon became one of the most popular in Paris and was attended by artists and prominent figures of Parisian society and the court of Versailles, where her connections allowed her to recruit a wealthy and often high-born clientele.
In 1778 Vigée Le Brun painted an official, full-length portrait of Marie Antoinette, whose consistent patronage she enjoyed until the outbreak of the French Revolution.
