The catalogue — portraits in chronological order, each with a commentary.
230 works by the painter and workshop · 11 copies and works after · 35,602 words of commentary · Part 6 of 7 · 1800–1835
Self-portrait (National Museum Cardiff): a small half-length of the painter at forty-five in a white cap, of the Petersburg year — the private version of the Hermitage academic self-portrait; Cardiff's picture came with the Davies sisters' bequests.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q23037752
Oil on canvas, 78.5 × 68 cm, signed and dated 1800 — State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. The painter at forty-five, at her easel, in a black dress with a white collar and a white cap, brush and palette in hand, turned to the viewer; on the canvas before her, a portrait of the Empress Maria Feodorovna in progress. The Petersburg counterpart of the Uffizi self-portrait of 1790, painted for the Imperial Academy of Arts, which had elected her an honorary member.
The Academy of Arts of Saint Petersburg received the painter as a membre honoraire in 1800 — the third of her academies after Rome and Bologna, and the most honorific — and the self-portrait was her gift in return, as the Uffizi picture had been to Florence. The Souvenirs describe the election as 'an honour I had not sought' and the picture as 'my portrait, painting the Empress'. Ten years separate the two academic self-portraits, and the painter chose the same composition for both: at work, on a royal sitter, turned to the viewer.
The face is older than the Uffizi's: the cheek fuller, the eyes more tired, the mouth closed — the teeth are gone; the dress is the same black with white, the cap is the Petersburg fashion's; the palette is held as in 1782. The Empress on the easel — Paul I's wife, the painter's patron after Catherine's death — is the exile's second statement of loyalty: the Queen in 1790, the Empress in 1800. The handling of the face is the careful manner of the self-portraits, and the picture is the most candid image of the painter in middle age.
The Academy of Arts; transferred to the Hermitage in the Soviet reorganisation of the 1920s; one of the museum's eight. A replica is in a private collection.
The Hermitage hangs it with the Russian portraits, and it is their author's face among them — the viewer who has seen the Kurakin, the Stroganova and the Chernyshev finds, at the end of the row, the woman who made them, at work on the Empress. The Uffizi and the Hermitage pictures have never been shown together.
The Empress on the easel; the closed mouth; the cap; the brush; the eyes. Then the Uffizi self-portrait in reproduction, ten years younger.
With the Uffizi picture of 1790 and the Straw Hat of 1782, the Hermitage self-portrait completes the trio of professional declarations — the painter with palette, the painter at the easel with the Queen, the painter at the easel with the Empress — and the sequence is a biography: Paris, Rome, Petersburg; twenty-seven, thirty-five, forty-five; the smile, the teeth, the closed mouth. The painter made no later self-portrait of this kind; the small heads of 1800 (Cardiff) and 1808 are private, and the academic statement was not repeated. The Hermitage's canvas is thus the last word of the exile's self-presentation, and its gravity is the word. The replica in private hands was made, the painter says, for a Russian friend.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q81759330 Wikipedia (es)
Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 55.2 cm, signed and dated 1800 — Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (on long-term loan to the Met in the 2010s). A girl of about sixteen in a white dress with a red shawl and a red ribbon in her dark hair, half-length against a dark ground, with a glance of unusual intensity: Varvara Ladomirskaya (1785–1840), the illegitimate daughter of Count Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov and Countess Ekaterina Stroganova, painted in Petersburg in the painter's last year there.
The Ladomirsky children were the offspring of Catherine II's former favourite Rimsky-Korsakov and Countess Stroganova, who had left her husband for him; given the name Ladomirsky and raised in Moscow, Varvara married the diplomat Ivan Narishkin in 1807. The painter's Souvenirs mention the Rimsky-Korsakov household in Moscow, where she stayed in 1801, and the picture may have been painted there or in Petersburg; its date, 1800, is on the canvas.
The portrait belongs with the Golovina and the Belozersky as the Russian manner at its most concentrated: a dark ground, a red shawl, a white dress, a face. The girl's expression — direct, unsmiling, almost challenging — is rare in the painter's young women, who usually smile; the red ribbon in the dark hair is the picture's colour; the handling of the shawl is the fluent Petersburg manner. It is, among the late Russian portraits, the one in which the sitter's character rather than the painter's formula seems to have determined the face.
The Narishkin family; the emigration; the American market; the Columbus Museum of Art, whose Schumacher and Howald collections gave the Ohio museum its French pictures; lent to the Met during its 2016 retrospective and after.
The picture's smallness and intensity make it a discovery in any hanging; at the Met in 2016 it stood out among the larger Russian pictures as the one with the most unsettling face.
The eyes; the red ribbon; the shawl; the dark ground. Then the date, the painter's last Petersburg year.
The painter's account of Moscow in 1801 — the Rimsky-Korsakov house, the 'superb' dinners, the Countess Stroganova who had left her husband for the former favourite and lived with him in open domesticity — is among the Souvenirs' most vivid chapters, and the Ladomirsky children were its household's. The portrait of the daughter was a commission from a family that the painter liked and whose irregularity she reports without censure; its intensity may be the sitter's, a girl of sixteen in a household that Moscow society watched.
The Columbus Museum of Art's French pictures are a small group, and the Ladomirsky is their jewel; the museum's loan of it to the Met for the 2016 retrospective and after gave the picture a visibility that its home could not, and it has since been among the most reproduced of the Russian portraits. Its signature and date are at the lower right. The catalogue's Narishkina alias is the sitter's married name.
Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Prussia (Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, Potsdam): the Potsdam version of the Hohenzollern Louise — the Queen in a white dress with a wreath and a shawl — painted at the Berlin sittings of the winter of 1801–02; the accessible of the two.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q122974579 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 100 × 83.5 cm — Hohenzollern Castle (Prussian royal house collection). Queen Louise of Prussia (1776–1810), at twenty-five, half-length, in a white dress with a red shawl and a wreath of flowers, her hair in curls, against a sky: painted in Berlin in 1801–02 on the painter's journey home from Russia, and the last royal portrait of the exile.
Louise, the wife of Frederick William III and the most beloved queen in Prussian history — the woman who faced Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807 and died at thirty-four, to become the Prussian nation's martyr — sat to the painter at Potsdam in the winter of 1801–02; the Souvenirs describe her as 'one of the most beautiful women I have seen', with 'a celestial face' and 'a grace that made her adored'. The painter was received at the Prussian court as the celebrity she had become in Russia; she was elected to the Berlin Academy; she painted the Queen twice (the Potsdam picture, in this catalogue, is the other) and the Queen's sister-in-law Princess Louis Ferdinand.
The composition is the Petersburg manner's — the white, the red shawl, the dark hair — with a wreath in the hair in the Flora mode and a sky behind; the face is the Queen's famous one, with the long neck the Berlin sculptors loved and the large eyes. The painter's account says the Queen 'wished to be painted simply', and the picture is simple: no crown, no ermine, a young woman in a shawl. The Hohenzollern picture is the better of the two versions.
The Prussian royal collection; kept by the Hohenzollern family through the monarchy's fall and the twentieth century; at Hohenzollern Castle in Swabia, the family's seat, with the family's treasures. Rarely lent; shown in Berlin in the Louise bicentenary exhibition of 2010.
The castle shows it among the family's portraits; the Potsdam version, at the Prussian Palaces foundation, is the accessible one, and it is the weaker. The painter's Souvenirs' page on Louise should be read with either.
The neck; the wreath; the shawl; the eyes; the sky. Then think of Tilsit, five years later.
The Berlin stay of the winter of 1801–02 was the exile's last chapter and its coda: the painter, homeward bound from Russia, was received by the Prussian court as a celebrity of the Russian one, and the Queen's sittings at Potsdam, the Academy's election, and the commissions of the Prussian nobility (the Princess Louis Ferdinand, in this catalogue at the Met) filled the months before the Paris road. The Souvenirs give Louise the last of their royal portraits and the warmest after the Queen's: the painter, who had painted two queens destroyed by revolution, found in Louise a queen who would be destroyed by war, and the portrait's simplicity — the wreath, the shawl, no sign of rank — is the painter's judgement of what suited her. The Potsdam version differs in the hair and the ground.
Aniela Czartoryska, née Radziwiłł (National Museum, Warsaw): the young Princess Czartoryska (1781–1808), in a white dress with a shawl — painted in Berlin for the Radziwiłł family; the Warsaw museum's, with the Helena Radziwiłł beside it.
Helena Radziwiłł, née Przeździecka (National Museum, Warsaw): the Princess Radziwiłł (1753–1821), the creator of the Arkadia gardens near Nieborów, at forty-nine, in a dark dress with a lace cap — the Polish Enlightenment's great gardener, painted in Berlin.
Portrait of Michel (Dallas Museum of Art): a young man recorded as 'Michel' — a Berlin or Paris sitter of 1802, in a dark coat; the Dallas museum's second, from the Reves collection.
Princess Tyufyakina (Chimei Museum, Tainan): a Russian princess as Iris, with a rainbow veil — the Liechtenstein Iris composition repeated for a Petersburg sitter; the Chimei Museum's Vigée Le Brun is Taiwan's.
Princess Louise of Prussia, Princess Radziwiłł (1770–1836) (Metropolitan Museum of Art): the King of Prussia's cousin, the wife of Prince Anton Radziwiłł, in a white dress with a red shawl — painted in Berlin in 1802; the Met's third Vigée Le Brun, acquired in 2006 — the painter's Berlin commission, and the Souvenirs describe the princess's 'distinction'.
Arabella Diana Cope, Duchess of Dorset (1769–1825) (Knole, National Trust): the Duchess of Dorset, the widow of the ambassador who had known the Queen, in a white dress with a red shawl — the first of the London portraits of 1803–05; Knole's Vigée Le Brun hangs among the Sackvilles' Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs.
Giuseppina Grassini (Musée Calvet, Avignon): the contralto (1773–1850), Napoleon's mistress and London's diva, in a turban with a shawl, half-length — the painter's London portrait of the singer she had first painted in Paris as Zaire (the Rouen picture in this catalogue); Avignon's Calvet holds it.
Mrs Chinnery (formerly Sedelmeyer collection): Margaret Chinnery, née Tresilian, the musical hostess of Gilwell Park in Essex, the patron of Viotti — in a white dress with a shawl, painted in London; the Souvenirs describe the Chinnerys' house and concerts, and the Viotti of 1805 in this catalogue is the household's other portrait. Private collection.
Prince Ivan Baryatinsky (1772–1825) (Pushkin Museum, Moscow): the second Baryatinsky, a repetition of the Tretyakov picture of 1800 made in Paris in 1803 for the prince, then at the London embassy.
A Woman, said to be Anne-Catherine (Aimée) Augier Vestris (National Museum of Women in the Arts): a small oval head of a young woman, identified by tradition as the dancer Aimée Augier, Auguste Vestris's wife — of the Paris year of 1802–03; the NMWA's third.
Giuseppina Grassini as Zaire (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen): the contralto in the role of Voltaire's Zaire, in a turban and a shawl, looking up — painted in Paris in 1802–04 when Grassini was Napoleon's, and the Souvenirs' 'superb' singer; the Avignon half-length of 1803 is in this catalogue.
Mrs Spencer Perceval, née Jane Wilson (private collection): the wife of the future prime minister — Perceval was assassinated in 1812 — in a white dress with a cap; the London portrait of the Tory household the painter visited.
Giovanni Battista Viotti (private collection): the violinist and composer (1755–1824), the founder of the modern violin school, at fifty, in a dark coat with his violin — painted in London, where Viotti lived with the Chinnerys in exile from Paris; the Souvenirs say he played for her 'as no one has played since'.
Angelica Catalani (1780–1849) (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth): the soprano at twenty-six, in a white dress with a shawl, a music-sheet in her hand — the greatest voice of the Napoleonic years, painted in London or Paris; the Kimbell's second Vigée Le Brun with the 1781 self-portrait.
Caroline Murat with her Daughter Letizia (Versailles): Napoleon's sister, the Grand Duchess of Berg and future Queen of Naples (1782–1839), with her daughter — the painter's one Bonaparte commission, which the Souvenirs describe with a hostility unique in the book: the sitter's lateness, her changes of dress, her vulgarity — 'I have painted real princesses who never tormented me as this one did'. Versailles's picture is the Empire's Vigée Le Brun.
Madame Du Barry, three-quarter length (private collection): the third portrait of the Comtesse — begun at Louveciennes in September 1789, the Souvenirs say, 'while the cannon sounded', left unfinished when the painter fled, and completed in 1807 from the sketch after the sitter's execution in 1793; the Comtesse in a white dress with a straw hat and a blue sash, against the Louveciennes park.
Helena Apolonia Potocka, née Massalska (National Museum, Warsaw): the Princess de Ligne, then Countess Potocka (1763–1815), the author of the convent memoirs and the Abbaye-aux-Bois's pupil, in a dark dress with a white turban — painted in Paris in 1808; the last of the painter's Potockis.
Documented work · 2 language editions Q62571116 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 140 × 118 cm — Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva. Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), at forty-two, as Corinne, the heroine of her novel of 1807, seated on the rocks of Cape Misenum in a white tunic with a red shawl and a turban, a lyre in her arm, her eyes raised in inspiration, with the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius behind: the last great portrait of the painter's career, made at Coppet in 1808 and finished in Paris in 1809, of the greatest woman writer of the age.
The painter visited Madame de Staël at Coppet, her château on Lake Geneva, in the summer of 1808, during her Swiss travels; the Souvenirs describe the household — Schlegel, Benjamin Constant, the daughter Albertine — and the sitter: 'she improvised, while I painted her, with the fire of a sibyl', and 'her face, which was not beautiful, became so when she spoke'. The portrait was Madame de Staël's own idea: she wished to be painted as her Corinne, the improvising poetess crowned at the Capitol, at the moment in the novel when Corinne sings on Cape Misenum of the Bay of Naples and of her own fate. The painter obliged with the composition the sitter asked for, and added what the sitter did not: a likeness.
The pose is the Sibyl's — the raised eyes, the turban, the shawl — transposed from Emma Hamilton to a woman of genius, and the lyre and the bay are Corinne's attributes; the face is Madame de Staël's, broad, dark, heavy, with the famous eyes, painted without the manner's softening and with a seriousness that matches the Golovina's. The Neapolitan landscape — Vesuvius, the bay, the rocks — is the painter's memory of 1790. The picture has been read as a meeting of two exiles (Madame de Staël was banned from Paris by Napoleon), two women who had made their way in a male world, and two theories of the inspired woman — the painter's and the writer's — which is the reading the sitter intended.
Madame de Staël's friends found the likeness unflattering — she 'looked like a cook', one said — and the sitter herself, the Souvenirs say, 'was satisfied'. The picture went to her family at Coppet; it was given to Geneva's museum in the twentieth century by the Necker-de Saussure descendants, and has been the city's image of its most famous daughter-by-marriage since. It was lent to the 2015 retrospective, where it closed the exhibition.
Geneva's museum hangs it in its Swiss and French rooms, and it is the picture in which the painter, at fifty-three, painted a mind: the lyre and the turban are the novel's, the face is the woman's, and the two do not quite agree — which is the picture's truth about its sitter.
The raised eyes; the lyre; the turban; Vesuvius; the mouth, which is about to improvise. Then read a page of Corinne. The picture's date is 1808 on the painter's list and 1809 in Geneva's catalogue, the canvas having been finished in Paris; the sitter saw it in Paris in 1809 and, the painter says, 'was moved'.
Self-portrait (private collection): the painter at fifty-three, in a white cap and a dark dress, half-length — the last self-portrait, of the Swiss year; the face is the Souvenirs' author's, and the mouth is closed.
Fanny Biron of Courland (National Museum, Wrocław): Princess Fanny Biron of Courland, one of the four famous Biron sisters of the Sagan duchy, in a white dress with a shawl — a Paris portrait of 1810; Wrocław's picture came with the Silesian collections.
A Young Lady as Flora (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm): a young woman with a wreath and a garland — the last Flora, painted at fifty-six; Stockholm's third Vigée Le Brun.
The Genius of Alexander I (Hermitage): an allegorical boy with a laurel wreath and a shield bearing the Tsar's name, on a cloud — painted in Paris in 1814 for the Tsar's entry into the city, the painter's homage to the sovereign whose country had sheltered her; the Hermitage's latest Vigée Le Brun.
Portrait of a Young Boy (National Museum of Women in the Arts): a small boy in a white collar, half-length — a late child's portrait, of the painter's Restoration family circle; the NMWA's second.
Jean-Charles Sapey (1775–1857) (private collection): the Dauphiné deputy and lawyer, in a black coat — a Restoration portrait of a parliamentary sitter, the painter's late male manner.
Saint Genevieve (Musée-promenade de Marly-le-Roi): a religious picture — the patron of Paris as a shepherdess with her sheep and a distaff — painted for the church of Louveciennes, the painter's parish, and now in the Marly museum; the painter's only devotional work, at sixty-six.
Aglaé-Angélique-Gabrielle de Gramont, Duchesse de Guiche (1787–1842) (private collection): the daughter of the Duchesse de Guiche of 1784 and 1794 — the third generation of the Polignac line the painter had painted since 1782 — in a blue velvet dress of the 1820s; the painter's last Polignac.
Documented work · 2 language editions Q55619837 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 100 × 75 cm — private collection. The Duchesse de Berry (1798–1870), at twenty-six, seated in a blue velvet dress with a white collar and a plumed hat, against a dark ground: the painter's last royal commission, made in 1824 at sixty-nine, of the Restoration's most fashionable princess.
Marie-Caroline of Naples — the granddaughter of Maria Carolina, whose children the painter had painted in 1790 — married the Duc de Berry, Charles X's younger son, in 1816; he was assassinated in 1820, and she bore, seven months later, the 'miracle child', the Duc de Bordeaux, the Bourbons' heir. In 1824 she was the court's leader of fashion and the patroness of the arts; in 1832 she would attempt a Vendéan rising against Louis-Philippe and be imprisoned. She sat to the painter, the Souvenirs say, 'with the greatest kindness', and the painter, who had painted her grandmother's children, found in her 'the vivacity of her family'.
The blue velvet and the plumed hat are the Restoration's fashion — the 1820s' return to the Van Dyck collar and the velvet — and the painter, who had invented the muslin of the 1780s, painted the new mode with the old skill: the velvet is laid broad, the collar's lace is exact, the plumes are a few strokes. The face is the Duchesse's — small, lively, not beautiful — and the manner's address is intact: the turn, the glance, the parted lips, at sixty-nine as at twenty-seven.
The Duchesse's collection; the Bourbon exile; private collections; exhibited at the 2015 retrospective as the painter's last royal portrait.
The picture's interest is its date: a portrait of 1824 by the painter of 1784, in which nothing has changed but the dress. The painter's Souvenirs were eleven years away; she was already, to the Duchesse's court, a monument.
The velvet; the collar; the plumes; the face. Then the Maria Cristina of 1790, the sitter's aunt at eleven, by the same hand thirty-four years before.
The Bourbon Restoration brought the painter back into a court she had left in 1789: Louis XVIII and Charles X were the Queen's brothers-in-law, the Duchesse d'Angoulême the Queen's daughter, and the painter's Versailles pictures were the regime's icons. She painted little for the court — the Berry is the only major royal commission of the period — but she was received, pensioned, and treated as the last living link to the Queen, and the Berry portrait's commission was the Duchesse's homage to that. The blue velvet's handling, at sixty-nine, is the evidence that the hand had not failed. The picture was exhibited in Paris in 2015 from a private collection and has not been shown since; its reproduction in the catalogue is the public's access to it. The Duchesse's own collection, sold after 1832, dispersed her portraits, and the painter's is the only one by a painter of the old court. Baillio's catalogue accepts it as autograph. The Wikidata record gives no collection; the picture is in France.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q131468737 Wikipedia (fr)
Oil on canvas, 73 × 59.5 cm — Musée des Beaux-Arts, Troyes. The Comtesse de Baussancourt, a young woman of the Restoration's last year, half-length, in a dark dress with a white collar and a lace cap, against a plain ground: one of the painter's final portraits, made at seventy-five, and the Troyes museum's record of the painter's late manner.
The painter's list ends in 1835 with Madame Baudin (Munich, in this catalogue); the portraits of the 1820s and 30s are few — the Duchesse de Berry, the Gramont children, the Comte Sapey, Madame de Rivière, this — and they are the work of a woman who painted, by her own account, 'only for friends and for pleasure'. The Baussancourt belongs to the circle of the painter's Champagne connections (the Baussancourts were a Troyes family), and its presence in Troyes suggests a family gift.
The manner is intact at seventy-five: the turn, the glance, the parted lips, the thin flesh, the plain ground; what has changed is the dress — the 1830s' dark silk and white collar — and the handling, which is drier, the hand less certain in the lace. The face is a young woman's, painted with the old tenderness. The picture is a document of longevity: the hand that painted the Queen in 1778 painted this in 1830.
The Baussancourt family; the Troyes museum by gift or bequest in the nineteenth century; the museum's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French rooms since.
Troyes's museum is small and the picture is easily found; beside the museum's Restoration portraits it is the only one by a painter who had known Marie Antoinette, and the comparison with the younger painters' harder manner is the picture's lesson.
The collar; the cap's lace; the face; the hands. Then the date, and the painter's age.
The handful of portraits after 1820 share a dry, careful handling, a restricted palette (dark dresses, white collars, plain grounds), and faces painted with the old tenderness and a new slowness; the Baussancourt is typical, and its value is as a record of what the manner became when the painter no longer needed it to sell. The Troyes museum's catalogue gives the date from the painter's list; the picture is unsigned, and its attribution rests on the provenance and the manner.
Troyes's collection includes the Restoration's provincial portraitists, and the Baussancourt hangs among them as the work of a different century: the turn of the head, the glance, the lips are the 1780s', and the young woman in the 1830 collar is addressed by a painter who had learned her address from Greuze sixty years before. The picture was cleaned for the museum's reopening and its flesh, which had yellowed, is again the painter's pink.
Of the Comtesse herself little is recorded beyond the family's Champagne seat and the marriage; the Baussancourts were a noble family of the Aube, and the portrait's entry into the Troyes museum from the family's descendants is the only documentation. She is, in the catalogue's sequence, the last of the painter's young women — the end of a line that began with the Comte de Brionne's daughters in 1771.
Léontine de Rivière (Hermitage): the painter's great-niece, the daughter of her niece Caroline Rivière — one of the editors of the Souvenirs — as a girl in a white dress; painted at seventy-six and given to a Russian friend, whence the Hermitage.
Madame Baudin (Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich): a lady of the Restoration in a dark dress with a white cap, half-length — the last portrait on the painter's list, painted at eighty; Munich's Vigée Le Brun, and the catalogue's last picture.
Works retrieved from Wikidata (creator P170 = Q213163, with image P18); dates from P571 where present, otherwise supplied from the literature; locations from P195/P276; materials P186; dimensions P2048/P2049. Tier labels reflect how many Wikipedia language editions carry an article on the work. Images from Wikimedia Commons; click to enlarge, arrow keys to step. Fetched 2026-08-21.