IX. The night of 5 October 1789, and the road to Rome

The Revolution found her at the summit. The Salon of 1789 opened on 25 August, with the Self-portrait with Julie (the second, the Louvre's), the Comtesse de la Châtre, the Madame Rousseau and her daughter, the Duchesse d'Orléans; the Bastille had fallen six weeks before; the Queen's painter had reason to be afraid, and the Souvenirs describe the summer's alarms — the stones thrown at her carriage, the threats, the night she spent in the house of a friend. On 5 October the Paris crowd marched on Versailles; on the 6th the royal family was brought to the Tuileries; that night — or, by her account, the same night — Vigée Le Brun left Paris in the public coach for Lyon, with her daughter and Julie's governess, dressed as a working woman, with a hundred louis. Her husband stayed, to protect the house and the pictures. She was thirty-four, and she would not come back for twelve years.

The exile's itinerary is the second half of the career, and it is worth giving in full because the work follows it exactly. Turin (October 1789), where the painter Porporati received her and where she painted his daughter. Rome (November 1789 – April 1791): lodged first with Ménageot, the director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici, then in her own rooms; painted the Polish and Russian grandees wintering in the city, the Princess Lubomirska and her adopted son, the Comtesse Potocka, the Cardinal de Bernis; sent her Self-portrait to the Uffizi's gallery of painters' self-portraits, at the invitation of the Grand Duke — the honour that placed her with Rosalba and Kauffman; visited Angelica Kauffman; saw the Raphael Stanze and the Sistine and wrote about them with genuine, if conventional, emotion. Naples (April 1790 – spring 1791): the Neapolitan Bourbons — Queen Maria Carolina, Marie Antoinette's sister, and her children; the British ambassador Sir William Hamilton and the woman he would marry, Emma Hart, whom the painter painted as a Bacchante, as Ariadne and as a Sibyl and described, with feline exactness, as a woman who had 'not much wit' but 'a great deal of talent for the attitudes'; the composer Paisiello; the Duchess of Fleury. Rome again (1791–92), Florence, Siena, Parma, Bologna, Venice (1792), Turin, and through Milan to Vienna (August 1792 – April 1795): two and a half years in the Austrian capital, where the Liechtensteins, Esterházys, Kinskys, Schönfelds and the Polish Czartoryskis sat to her, where she painted her full-lengths of the two Liechtenstein princesses as Iris and a Vestal, and where she heard of the death of the Queen. Then Prague, Dresden, Berlin, and in July 1795 Saint Petersburg.

Two things should be said about the Italian years. The first is that they were a triumph: the French Revolution had made her a celebrity as well as a victim, and the courts of Italy received the Queen's painter as the Queen's representative; she was elected to the academies of Rome, Bologna and Parma, and her Uffizi self-portrait — the painter at work, in a black dress and a white turban, looking over her shoulder as if interrupted, with a portrait of the Queen on the easel — was her manifesto in exile: I am still painting her. The second is that the work changed less than one might expect. The Italian light, the Raphaels and the Correggios she saw, the antique: they enter the pictures as props — the Lady Hamilton as a Sibyl is a Domenichino in a Neapolitan sitter — but the manner is the Paris manner, and the sitters of Rome and Naples are painted as the Polignacs were. She was, by then, a firm that travelled, and the firm's product was what its clients wanted.

X. Russia, 1795–1801: the second career

Saint Petersburg was the great adventure and the great success. She arrived with letters to the French ambassador and was received by Catherine II within days — the Souvenirs describe the Empress's small stature, her 'fine head', her 'very white hands' and her 'bad teeth', and her kindness; the painter's first commission was a double portrait of the Empress's granddaughters, the Grand Duchesses Alexandra and Elena, which the Empress disliked for its bare arms and its à la grecque costume and had altered; and Catherine died in November 1796 before a portrait of herself could be begun. Under Paul I — whom the painter found 'very ugly' and 'capable of great goodness and great cruelty' — and his Empress Maria Feodorovna, the commissions continued, and the Russian nobility, the richest in Europe and the most Francophile, made the painter their own. Six years produced about a hundred portraits: the Stroganovs, the Golitsyns, the Kurakins, the Skavronskaias, the Golovinas, the Baryatinskys, the Tolstoys, the Yusupovs, the Shuvalovs, the Polish Potockis and Sapiehas who wintered in the capital, the deposed King Stanisław Augustus Poniatowski — her friend and the best talker she knew — in his last years; the children of the Tsar; and the young Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna, whom she painted in a red dress and whose 'angelic' beauty she praised beyond any sitter since the Queen.

The Russian portraits are the second peak of the work. They are larger, often, than the Paris ones — the Russian taste was for the three-quarter and the full-length — more richly dressed, and more exotic in their props: cashmere shawls, turbans, Greek tunics, the à l'antique costume of the 1790s that the painter had helped to invent. The faces are the manner's; some of them — the Skavronskaia of the Jacquemart-André, lolling in her shawl with the languor the painter remarked in her (she 'spent her days on a sofa'); the Golovina of the Barber Institute, wrapped in a red shawl with her hair loose, the most 'Romantic' picture she ever painted; the Anna Pitt as Hebe; the Princess Belozersky — are among the best things she did. Russia also gave her the worst thing that happened to her: Julie, now seventeen, fell in love with the secretary of the director of the imperial theatres, Gaétan Nigris, and married him in 1800 against her mother's bitter opposition; the Souvenirs describe the quarrel with a pain that sixty years had not healed, and the relationship between the painter and the daughter she had painted so often never recovered. Julie returned to Paris in 1804, separated from Nigris, and died there in 1819, poor, at thirty-nine; her mother paid the debts.

The exile ended by stages. The Directory struck her from the list of émigrés in June 1800 — the petition had been signed by 255 artists, David among them — and in 1801 she left Petersburg for Moscow, Berlin (where the Queen of Prussia, Louise, sat to her and where she was received into the Berlin Academy), Dresden, and Paris, which she reached on 18 January 1802. She was forty-six. She had been away for twelve years and three months, and she had painted, by her own count, some two hundred portraits in exile.