Have Paintbrush, Will Travel

Her father was an overlooked pastel artist and painter of fans, her mother was a hairdresser, but by October 5, 1789, when Parisian women from her original walk of life marched on Versailles, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun had risen high above her – and their – original station. Now portraitist to Queen Marie-Antoinette and a close friend to Madame du Barry, she promptly grasped the seriousness of the moment. A day later, in laborer’s clothes, she boarded a stagecoach out of Paris. Political refugees usually gripe and moan: not she. Cheerful and outgoing by nature, a born socialite, but free of the backstabbing ways of the upper crust, she made her paintbrush a passport. For twelve years she roamed Europe, from court to court, painting her way through Italy, imperial Vienna and London, and Catherine the Great’s St. Petersburg. Fortune favored her (the French Revolution, briefly a threat to life and career, in the end only spread her name far and wide). The same good luck now smiles on those who own her paintings: at Sotheby’s New York in early 2024, her Self-Portrait in a Traveling Costume sold for the sizable sum of 3.1 million dollars.