Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Élisabeth Louise Vigée was born in Paris on 16 April 1755 and built her reputation in Ancien Régime society as Marie Antoinette's portrait painter. Her style straddled Rococo subject matter and the rising Neoclassical mode, and her clientele stretched across European aristocrats, actors, and writers. She was elected to art academies in ten cities; Reynolds compared her to the old Dutch masters. Over her career she produced 660 portraits and 200 landscapes, now held in the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Met, and collections across Europe and the United States. In her eighties, between 1835 and 1837, she published three volumes of memoirs with help from her nieces - part epistolary, part advice to young painters. She died on 30 March 1842.