The picture

Oil on canvas, 135 × 95 cm, signed and dated 1790 — Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris. Catherine Engelhardt, Countess Skavronskaia (1761–1829), niece of Potemkin and wife of the Russian ambassador to Naples, reclining against a cushion in a white dress with a striped Turkish shawl, one hand at her cheek, the other holding a miniature of her husband, her eyes half-closed: the Neapolitan portrait that many consider the painter's most beautiful picture.

The sitter

The Souvenirs give her a portrait as vivid as the painting: 'as gentle and as pretty as an angel', and 'as lazy': she 'spent her days on a sofa, wrapped in a black fur coat, without a corset', with a slave at her feet to tell her stories, and 'her only occupation was to look at herself in a mirror'. She was Potemkin's niece and, rumour said, his mistress; her husband Pavel Skavronsky, the ambassador, was an eccentric who spoke only in recitative; she was covered in Potemkin's diamonds and did not wear them. The painter painted her twice — here, in Naples, and in 1796 in Petersburg (Louvre, in this catalogue) — and the Souvenirs say she 'never tired of looking at her'.

The picture

The pose is the languor described: the body reclining, the head resting on the hand, the eyes half-closed, the shawl falling loose — the manner's intimacy pushed to somnolence. The white dress and the striped shawl are the painter's most fluent fabric passage, the cushion's red the one strong colour, the face a study in the soft, sleepy beauty the painter admired; the miniature of the husband in the hand is the portrait's one conventional sign. The picture is the costumed portrait's opposite: no allegory, no antique, a woman as she was on her sofa.

History

The Skavronsky family; the Russian market; Nélie Jacquemart, the portraitist and collector who with her husband Édouard André built the Boulevard Haussmann house and its collection, bought it in the 1890s; the Jacquemart-André since 1913, where it hangs in the boudoir with the museum's French eighteenth century and is its most reproduced picture.

Seeing it

The Jacquemart-André's small rooms are the right scale: the picture is seen close, and at close range the shawl's stripes and the dress's folds are the painter at her most free. The Louvre's 1796 version, a few kilometres away, is the same woman six years later and less happy, and the two should be seen in one day.

What to look at

The half-closed eyes; the hand at the cheek; the shawl; the cushion; the miniature. Then the Souvenirs' page, which is the picture in words. The painter's list records the Naples portrait as 'the Countess Skavronska, reclining', and Baillio's catalogue accepts it as autograph throughout; the signature and date are at the lower left. Nélie Jacquemart, who had been a portraitist herself before her marriage, bought it as a professional's tribute, and it hangs in her own former boudoir. The picture was lent to the 2015 retrospective, where it was the Naples room's centre, and to the Met, where it was the most photographed thing in the show.

Self-portrait (Bank of England Museum): a large (270 × 210 cm, per the record, which may be in error) self-portrait in the Bank's collection — a version of the self-portrait type, whose attribution and dimensions the catalogue records with caution.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm, signed and dated Roma 1790 — Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Corridoio Vasariano collection of self-portraits). The painter at thirty-five, at her easel, in a black dress with a white collar and a white turban with a red band, a palette in one hand and a brush in the other, turned over her shoulder to the viewer with her mouth open in a smile; on the canvas before her, a portrait of Marie Antoinette in progress. The exile's manifesto, and the most famous of the self-portraits after the Straw Hat.

The commission

In Rome in 1790 the painter received, through the Grand Duke of Tuscany's envoy, the invitation to contribute a self-portrait to the Uffizi's collection — the gallery of painters' self-portraits founded by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici in the seventeenth century, in which Rosalba, Kauffman and a handful of women hung among hundreds of men. The Souvenirs describe the honour and the sitting: she painted herself 'at work', and 'on the canvas I placed the Queen, whom I was then painting from memory'. The Queen's portrait on the easel was the statement: the painter of the Queen, in exile, still at her work.

The picture

The pose — the body at the easel, the head over the shoulder, the brush raised — is the Straw Hat's professional declaration in the exile's dress: the black, the white turban (the antique fashion of the 1790s), the red band. The smile shows the teeth, as in 1786; the face is older, fuller, and more assured. The picture was admired in Rome — the Souvenirs say the Roman painters came to see it — and its reception in Florence placed her, in the Souvenirs' words, 'among the painters of all ages', which was the point.

Versions

A replica, also signed and dated, was made for the painter's friend Lord Bristol (National Trust, Ickworth, in this catalogue) and others followed; the Uffizi picture is the prime.

History

The Uffizi since 1790; shown in the Vasari Corridor's self-portrait sequence and, since the corridor's closure, in the gallery's rooms; lent to the 2015–16 retrospective.

Seeing it

In Florence the picture is one face among six hundred, and the context is the experience: the painter hangs with Rosalba, with Kauffman, with Rembrandt and Velázquez, and the turban and the smile are what the eye finds.

What to look at

The Queen on the easel; the brush; the turban; the teeth; the black dress. Then the date and the place — Roma 1790 — which are the exile's.

Reception

The Uffizi self-portrait is the picture by which Italy knew her and by which the Florentine gallery's visitors have known her since; its reproduction in the nineteenth century made the turban and the smile the painter's second face after the straw hat. Its modern readers have noted the Queen on the easel as the exile's political statement, and the teeth as the painter's refusal of the decorum the 1787 critics demanded. The Ickworth replica, made for Lord Bristol the collecting bishop, is the better preserved of the two in surface; the Uffizi's has darkened slightly with the corridor's centuries.

The Artist at Work (Self-portrait) (Royal Agricultural University, Cirencester): a version of the Uffizi self-portrait type — the painter at her easel — in an English institutional collection, of uncertain status; it may be a replica made for an English sitter of the Roman year.

Countess Anna Potocka (private collection): Anna Potocka, née Tyszkiewicz (1776–1867)? — or Anna Potocka née Cetner, the mother of the memoirist — a Polish countess of the Roman colony in a white dress with a lyre; the Potockis were the painter's most numerous Polish sitters, and the identifications among them are tangled.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 138.4 × 99 cm — private collection. Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton, half-length, in a white tunic with a striped shawl over her head and shoulders, a scroll inscribed in Greek in her hands, her eyes raised: the Sibyl after Domenichino, painted in Naples in 1791–92, the picture the painter valued above all she made in Italy and carried across Europe as her demonstration piece.

Domenichino's Sibyl

The model was the Cumaean Sibyl of Domenichino in the Borghese (and its Capitoline sister) — the turbaned prophetess with the scroll, the century's favourite Bolognese image — and the painter's version is a portrait in its form: Emma's face, Emma's hair under the shawl, Emma's 'attitude' of inspiration, the eyes raised, the mouth parted, the scroll's Greek (a line from the Sibyl's prophecy of the Virgin's child, in the Christian reading of Virgil's Eclogue). The painter says she 'painted it with love' and that it 'was thought to be a Domenichino by several connoisseurs who did not know its author', which was the compliment she wanted.

The demonstration piece

The Souvenirs trace the picture's travels: shown in Vienna, where the Prince de Ligne and the court admired it; in Petersburg, where the Empress's painter Lampi praised it; in Berlin; in Paris in 1802, where the painter hung it in her studio for visitors; and kept by her until her death. It was the history picture — a Sibyl after an Old Master, painted from a famous model — by which the Queen's portraitist claimed the higher rank the Académie had withheld, and its reception across Europe was the claim's vindication in her own eyes. A smaller version (the Life Study in this catalogue) was the sketch from which it was made.

The picture

The handling is the painter's most careful: the face modelled with a Bolognese smoothness, the shawl's stripes laid with precision, the Greek letters legible, the tunic's white broad; the colour is restrained — white, the shawl's red and blue, the dark ground — and the picture is, deliberately, an Old Master's. It is less alive than the Bacchante, and the painter's preference for it over the Bacchante is the measure of what she thought painting was for.

History

The painter's own until 1842; her estate; private collections in France and England; exhibited at the 2015 retrospective from a private collection. Its absence from a public museum is one of the œuvre's oddities.

Seeing it

Rarely possible; the 2015 exhibition hung it with the Bacchante from Port Sunlight, and the pairing was the painter's two theories of Emma Hamilton in one room — the attitude and the woman.

What to look at

The scroll's Greek; the shawl's stripes; the raised eyes; the face, which is Emma's; the smoothness, which is Domenichino's.

The Sibyl and the painter's self-estimate

The painter's preference for the Sibyl is a window onto her values. She judged her own work by the academy's hierarchy — the history picture above the portrait, the Old Master's manner above the modern — and the Sibyl, which passed for a Domenichino, satisfied the standard in a way her portraits, whatever their success, could not. The modern viewer's preference for the Bacchante is the reversal of that hierarchy, and the two Emmas, seen together, are the argument in miniature: the painter's picture of what painting should be, and the picture of what she actually saw.

Madame Adélaïde de France (Musée Jeanne-d'Aboville, La Fère): Louis XV's daughter (1732–1800), the King's aunt, at fifty-nine, in a dark dress with a lace cap — painted in Rome, where Mesdames had fled in February 1791; the Souvenirs describe the old princesses' exile and their 'courage'. The La Fère picture is the Aboville collection's.

Madame Victoire de France (Phoenix Art Museum): the younger of Mesdames (1733–1799), in grey with a fichu — the Rome pendant to the Adélaïde; the two sisters, who died in Trieste in exile, were the last of Louis XV's children.

Carlo Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico (National Museum of Archaeology, History and Art, Luxembourg): the Como poet and traveller (1742–1796), the author of the Viaggio and the friend of Alfieri, in a brown coat — painted in Rome, where Rezzonico was the painter's guide to the antiquities; Luxembourg's one Vigée Le Brun.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 99.1 × 74.9 cm, signed and dated Roma 1791 — Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Legion of Honor, Mildred Anna Williams collection). A young woman in a white dress with a striped shawl and a turban, seated against a sky with a hand at her breast, looking over her shoulder with the manner's glance: the French actress Hyacinthe Roland (1766–1816), then the mistress and later the wife of Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, the future Governor-General of India and Wellington's elder brother.

The sitter

Hyacinthe Roland, of the Palais-Royal theatre, was Wellesley's companion from 1786 and bore him five children before their marriage in 1794; she was painted in Rome in 1791, where the couple were travelling, and the Souvenirs do not mention her — the painter's list gives 'Madame Roland' among the Roman portraits. She became Marchioness Wellesley in 1799, refused to follow her husband to India, and lived apart from him in England, where she was snubbed as a former actress and a Frenchwoman; her son's descendants are the present Wellesleys.

The picture

The composition is the Roman manner of 1790–91 — the turban, the striped shawl, the sky — which the painter used for the Skavronskaia and the Uffizi self-portrait, and the sitter's face is among the liveliest of the Italian portraits: a Parisian actress's alertness in the exile's costume. The hand at the breast is the Polignac's gesture; the shawl's stripes are the Sibyl's; the sky is the Straw Hat's. It is a picture of a woman who, like the painter, was making her way abroad on her looks and her wit.

History

The Wellesley family; English collections; the Mildred Anna Williams collection, given to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in the 1940s; San Francisco since. One of three Vigée Le Bruns on the American West Coast with the Getty's and the Huntington's Vaudreuils.

Seeing it

The Legion of Honor hangs it in its French rooms, where it is the museum's most elegant eighteenth-century portrait; the signature Roma 1791 at the lower right places it exactly.

What to look at

The turban; the hand at the breast; the shawl's stripes; the glance over the shoulder; the sky. Then the Wellesley connection, which the picture does not know.

The Roman portraits

The painter's Roman clientele of 1790–92 was mixed in a way the Paris one had not been: émigrés, English travellers on the Grand Tour, Polish and Russian grandees, Roman nobility and the occasional actress; the Roland belongs with the English group, and its style — the sky, the shawl, the turban — is the painter's Italian manner, lighter and more outdoor than the Paris one. The picture's signature with the place-name is the painter's habit of the exile: Roma, Vienne, Pétersbourg on the canvases as a record of the road. The Legion of Honor acquired it with the Williams collection's French pictures, and it has been the museum's representative Vigée Le Brun in exhibitions since; its condition is good, with the sky's glazes intact.

A Child of the Comminges Family (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston): a small girl in white, recorded as an anonymous painting now attributed to Vigée Le Brun — of the Roman year's émigré children; Houston's attribution is recent.

Self-portrait (National Trust, Ickworth): the replica of the Uffizi self-portrait of 1790, made for the Earl-Bishop of Bristol — the painter at her easel with the Queen on the canvas — and hung at Ickworth with his portrait; signed and dated, and the better preserved of the two.

Julie Le Brun as a Bather (private collection): the daughter in a white chemise at a stream, her feet in the water — a baigneuse in the Greuze-Fragonard mode, of the Italian years; the most unusual of the Julie pictures.

Julie Le Brun Looking over her Shoulder (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna): the daughter at twelve, turning over her shoulder in the painter's own Uffizi pose — left in Bologna, where the painter was received into the Accademia Clementina in 1792; Bologna's Italian Julie, with Parma's.

Life Study of Lady Hamilton as the Cumaean Sibyl (private collection): the small oil sketch from which the large Sibyl was made — Emma's head in the turban, the eyes raised, painted from the model; the painter's sketches are rare, and this is the best documented.

Julie Le Brun with a Crown of Roses (Galleria Nazionale, Parma): the daughter at twelve, in white with roses in her hair, half-length — painted in Italy, and left in Parma, where the painter was received into the Academy in 1792; Parma's picture is the Italian Julie.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 140 × 99.5 cm, signed and dated 1792 — State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Anna Pitt (1772–1864), fourteen, the daughter of Lord Camelford and cousin of the younger Pitt, as Hebe, cupbearer of the gods, in a white tunic with a gold border, offering a cup to Jupiter's eagle, which drinks, against a sky with clouds: painted in Rome in 1792 for the sitter's family, and the painter's most accomplished mythological portrait of a young woman.

The sitter

Anne Pitt, daughter of Thomas Pitt, 1st Baron Camelford — the connoisseur who built Camelford House and whose Grand Tour taste brought his family to Rome in 1791–92 — was painted at fourteen in the Roman manner of allegory; she married Lord Grenville, Pitt's foreign secretary and briefly prime minister, in 1792, the year of the picture, and lived to ninety-two as Lady Grenville of Dropmore. The painter's Souvenirs mention the Pitts as English friends in Rome; the portrait was the family's commission.

Hebe and the eagle

The Hebe — the goddess of youth feeding the eagle from her cup — was an English fashion (Reynolds's Mrs Musters as Hebe, Kauffman's Hebes) that the painter adopted for an English sitter, and the eagle, which she says she painted from a live bird 'that nearly blinded me', is the picture's tour de force: the wings spread, the beak in the cup, the feathers exact. The girl's face is a portrait — the long Pitt nose, the serious eyes — and the tunic is the antique dress of the 1790s; the clouds are the allegory's furniture.

History

The Pitt family; sold; in Russian collections by the nineteenth century — the Yusupovs' — and nationalised in 1917 to the Hermitage, where it is one of the museum's eight Vigée Le Bruns and the only one of its Italian period.

Seeing it

The Hermitage hangs it in the French galleries with the Russian portraits of 1795–1801, and its presence among them is an accident of collecting: a Roman picture of an English girl, in Petersburg, beside the Stroganovs. The eagle is the thing to see.

What to look at

The eagle's beak in the cup; the wings; the girl's nose; the gold border; the clouds. Then the date — the year the Terror began — on a picture of a girl feeding a bird.

The painter and the English

The Hebe is the painter's first important English commission and the beginning of a relation that the London years of 1803–05 would complete: the English in Rome — the Pitts, Lord Bristol, the Hamiltons in Naples — were the exile's first foreign clients, and they brought with them the English taste for the allegorical portrait (Reynolds's) that the painter adopted for them. The Souvenirs are cool about the English but warm about the Pitts, and the picture's care — the eagle, the girl's face, the tunic's gold — is the care of a commission that mattered. The Yusupov provenance — the picture was in the Moika palace by the 1830s — is the usual route of the painter's English and Italian pictures into Russia: bought by the Russian grandees on their own Grand Tours.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 75.3 × 62.6 cm — Fondation Bemberg, Toulouse. Countess Caroline von Kageneck, a young Austrian in Rome, as Flora, in a white tunic with a wreath of flowers in her hair, holding a garland, against a sky: one of the Roman allegorical portraits of 1792, and the Bemberg's principal Vigée Le Brun.

The sitter

The Kagenecks were a Breisgau family in Austrian service; the Countess, painted in Rome in 1792 at the end of the painter's Italian years, appears in the painter's list as 'Madame de Kagenek, as Flora'. Nothing more is known of her sitting; the picture belongs to the series of Flora portraits — the Julie as Flora of 1799 is its last — in which the painter gave young women the goddess's flowers and left the face a portrait.

Flora

The Flora — the Roman goddess of flowers, with her wreath and garland, after the antique Flora Farnese the painter had seen in Naples — was the allegorical role she gave most often, because its costume was a tunic and a wreath and its attribute a bouquet: the easiest allegory to paint and the prettiest. The Kageneck Flora is the type at its simplest — half-length, the wreath, the garland, the sky — with the face the manner's: the turn, the glance, the lips.

History

The sitter's family; private collections; Georges Bemberg, the Argentine-born collector whose foundation in the Hôtel d'Assézat at Toulouse opened in 1995 with his French eighteenth century and his Bonnards; the Bemberg since. Toulouse thus has two Vigée Le Bruns — the Crussol at the Augustins and this — across the river from each other.

Seeing it

The Bemberg hangs it in a small room with the foundation's Fragonards and Bouchers, where its sky and its flowers are at home; the Augustins' Crussol is the comparison — the Paris manner of 1785 and the Roman of 1792 in one city.

What to look at

The wreath; the garland; the tunic's border; the glance; the sky. Then the Julie as Flora in reproduction, for the type's last word.

The Floras

The painter's Floras are a small series worth listing: the Countess Kagenek (1792, Toulouse), the Julie as Flora (1799, St Petersburg, Florida), the Young Lady as Flora (1811, Stockholm), and studio variants; the type descends from the antique Flora and from Titian's, which the painter saw in Florence in 1792, and its attraction was the wreath — flowers in the hair being, with the straw hat and the turban, the painter's favourite head-dress. The Kagenek picture, painted in the year of the Florence visit, is the first, and its freshness is the first encounter's.

Seeing it

The Bemberg's picture is small and is hung among small things; the wreath's flowers — roses, anemones, a sprig of jasmine — are painted with the care the painter gave to the flowers on her hats, and the garland in the hands is a second still life. The sitter's Austrian face, broad and fair, is a change from the painter's French type, and the manner's glance sits on it a little uneasily, which is the picture's interest.

Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi (Toledo Museum of Art): the Venetian salonnière (1760–1836), the 'Madame de Staël of Venice', Byron's and Canova's friend and the author of the Ritratti, in a turban with a shawl — painted in Venice in 1792 in the painter's Italian farewell; Toledo's second.

Marguerite Porporati (Galleria Sabauda, Turin): the daughter of the Turin engraver Carlo Antonio Porporati, who had received the painter in October 1789 on her first night of exile — a small head of a girl with a dog, painted on the 1792 return through Turin as a gift to the family; the Souvenirs record Porporati's kindness.

Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski in a Blue Mantle (private collection): the Polish prince (1734–1823), the patron of the Polish Enlightenment and the founder of the Puławy collection, in a blue cloak — the first of the painter's two Czartoryskis of 1793; the second is in this catalogue.

Sophia Fries as Sappho (Jaroměřice Castle): the daughter of the Viennese banker Count Fries, as Sappho with a lyre — a Viennese allegorical portrait of the 1793 Liechtenstein type, in a Moravian castle collection; the pastel of her brother Moriz is in this catalogue.

Baron Grigory Stroganov (Hermitage): the Baron (1770–1857), the future diplomat and ambassador to Constantinople, at twenty-three, in a brown coat — painted in Vienna, where he was attached to the Russian embassy, and the painter's introduction to the Stroganovs before Petersburg; the husband of the Anna Stroganova.

Count Grigory Chernyshev with a Mask in his Hand (Hermitage): a young Russian count (1762–1831) in a domino with a black mask — the carnival portrait of the Vienna winter, the painter's only masquerade picture; the Souvenirs describe the Viennese balls.

Countess Maria Theresia Bucquoi, née Parr (Minneapolis Institute of Art): a Bohemian countess (1746–1818) in a red shawl and a turban, seated — the Vienna manner's richest colour; Minneapolis's Vigée Le Brun, of the Bucquoi family of Nové Hrady.

Izabela Lubomirska, née Czartoryska (Lviv National Art Gallery): the 'blue marquise' (1736–1816), the patroness of the Lubomirski as Fame, at fifty-seven, in a dark dress with a white cap — painted in Vienna, where she lived in the 1790s; the Lviv gallery's picture came from the Lubomirski collections at Łańcut.

Countess Siemontkowsky Bystry (private collection): the pendant — the countess in a white dress with a shawl; the pair have stayed together.

Count Siemontkowsky Bystry (private collection): a Polish count in a fur coat, the husband of the next entry — a pair of Vienna portraits of the Polish colony's minor nobility.

Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski (1734–1823) (private collection): the second 1793 Czartoryski, half-length in a fur-lined coat with the White Eagle — the prince whose Puławy house became the Polish Enlightenment's museum, and whose wife Izabela the painter would also paint.

Princess Hermenegilde Esterházy, née Liechtenstein, as a Vestal (Liechtenstein Collection, Vienna): the full-length pendant to the Iris — the princess (1775–1845), at eighteen, as a Vestal virgin in white with a veil, holding a lamp, still where her sister-in-law runs; the painter's Vienna masterpiece with the Iris, and the two hang together.

Theresa, Countess Kinsky (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena): the young Countess Kinsky, née Dietrichstein, in a white dress with a red shawl, seated on a sofa, her face serious — the Norton Simon's Vigée Le Brun, and the Vienna portrait nearest in mood to the Golovina.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 222 × 159 cm — Liechtenstein Collection, Vienna. Princess Karoline (1768–1831), wife of Prince Alois I of Liechtenstein, full-length, as Iris, the messenger of the gods, in a white tunic with a rainbow-coloured veil flying from her shoulders, running through the clouds: one of the two full-lengths of Liechtenstein princesses the painter made in Vienna in 1793 — the other, Princess Hermenegilde Esterházy as a Vestal, is in this catalogue — and the most theatrical of her costumed portraits.

Vienna, 1793

The painter arrived in Vienna in August 1792 and stayed until April 1795; the Liechtensteins — Prince Alois, the great collector, and his wife Karoline, a famous beauty and a famous intelligence — were her principal patrons, and the two full-lengths of the princess and her sister-in-law were the exile's grandest commission since the Queen's. The Souvenirs describe the princess as 'one of the most beautiful women in Vienna' and the prince as 'the possessor of a gallery that was the first in the city'.

Iris

The Iris — the rainbow goddess running with her veil — was an invention for a sitter who, the painter says, 'had a light and rapid walk'; the pose is a running figure from the antique (a Victory, a dancing Maenad) in the à la grecque costume, with the veil's rainbow the picture's colour and its most daring passage. The face is the princess's — long, intelligent, amused — and the full-length scale is that of the Queen's state portraits applied to an allegory. The Esterházy Vestal is its pendant: the one running, the other still.

History

The Liechtenstein collection since 1793; shown in the princes' Vienna garden palace and, since 2004, in the Liechtenstein Museum's displays; lent to the 2015 retrospective.

Seeing it

The Liechtenstein garden palace hangs the two princesses together in a room of the family's portraits, and the pairing is the exile's most spectacular: two life-size women in Greek dress, one running through clouds, in the house that commissioned them. The rainbow veil must be seen in the original; reproduction kills it.

What to look at

The veil's rainbow; the running pose; the clouds; the face; the tunic's fall. Then the Vestal beside it.

Vienna's painters and the commission

The Liechtenstein commission placed the painter among the Viennese portraitists of the 1790s — Lampi, Füger, the émigré Ducreux — as the court's newest fashion; the full-length allegories were her answer to Lampi's state portraits, and the Souvenirs record the success: 'the two princesses were shown to all Vienna'. The pictures' scale, over two metres, required a studio larger than the painter's lodging, and Prince Alois provided one in the palace. Both were engraved; the Iris became the emblem of the 'Greek' fashion in Vienna, where the painter's turbans and tunics were adopted by the court's women in the winter of 1793–94 — the year, she notes, of the Queen's death. The picture's condition is excellent, the veil's colours — which a lesser painter's glazes would have lost — intact; the Liechtenstein conservation studio cleaned both princesses before 2004.

Portrait of a Lady (Vienna period): an unidentified Viennese sitter of 1793, in a white dress with a shawl — recorded on Wikidata without a title; one of the portraits the painter's list gives for Vienna without a surviving name. Private collection.

The Countess von Schönfeld with her Daughter (University of Arizona Museum of Art): Ursula Margarethe von Schönfeld, the wife of the Saxon envoy in Vienna, embracing her small daughter — the Self-portrait with Julie composition transposed to a Viennese mother; Arizona's Kress-collection picture is among the finest of the Vienna portraits.

The Princess von und zu Liechtenstein (private collection): a half-length of one of the Liechtenstein princesses — probably Karoline, the Iris — in ordinary dress, of the Vienna years; a family repetition.

The Duchesse de Guiche (private collection): Aglaé de Polignac, Duchesse de Guiche, at twenty-six, in Vienna — the Polignacs' daughter painted ten years after the 1784 picture in this catalogue, now an émigrée, in a turban; the Polignac family had settled in Vienna, where the Duchesse de Polignac died in December 1793, and this is the daughter the following year.

Pelagia Sapieha, née Potocka (Royal Castle, Warsaw): the princess (1775–1846), at nineteen, full-length in a white tunic with a lyre and a shawl, against a landscape — the Vienna allegorical portrait at full scale, of the Liechtenstein type; the Warsaw Royal Castle's picture is Poland's grandest Vigée Le Brun. A later version (1798, Montrésor) is in this catalogue.

Princess Alexandra Golitsyna and her Son Piotr (Pushkin Museum, Moscow): a Russian princess in Vienna embracing her small son — the mother-and-child composition in the Vienna manner; the Pushkin's Vigée Le Bruns came from the Moscow palaces' nationalisations.

Self-portrait, bust-length (private collection): a small head of the painter at thirty-nine, in a turban, of the Vienna years — the kind of self-portrait she gave to friends; the painter's list records several.