Madame Perregaux

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a French painter, and is generally recognized as the most important female painter of the 18th century. Madame Perregaux’s portrait, painted on the eve of the French Revolution, is typical of the glamorous, flattering portrayals of female sitters on which Vigée Le Brun’s modern fame chiefly rests. A professional artist by her early teens, Vigée Le Brun painted a number of portraits of Marie Antoinette and other members of the royal circle. She left France for twelve years after the royal family's arrest in 1789 and traveled the continent, eventually painting more than 650 portraits and 200 landscapes. She was elected to art academies in ten European cities before eventually returning to France, where she published her memoirs before her death in 1842.