XI. The costumed portrait: Bacchantes, Sibyls, Hebes, and the antique

One genre of the exile's work deserves its own account, because it is the part of the œuvre most likely to puzzle a modern viewer. From the mid-1780s, and increasingly in Italy and Russia, Vigée Le Brun painted her sitters as someone else: Sophie de Tott as a Bacchante (1785), the Comtesse de Clermont-Tonnerre as a Sultana, Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante and as the Cumaean Sibyl (1790–92), Anna Pitt as Hebe (1792), the Countess Kagenek as Flora, the Liechtenstein princesses as Iris and a Vestal (1793), Sophia Fries as Sappho, Julie as Flora, the Princess Lubomirska's adopted son as the Genius of Fame, Madame de Staël as Corinne (1808), and — posthumously, in a sense — Alexander I's Genius. The genre had a history: Reynolds's Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse and his allegorical ladies; Kauffman's Muses; the French 'portrait historié' of the Nattier generation, in which duchesses were Dianas. Vigée Le Brun's version was her own: the costume was the antique à la grecque dress of the 1790s, which she had helped make fashionable and which Emma Hamilton's 'attitudes' — the performances in shawls and tunics that Goethe and the painter both witnessed in Naples — had turned into theatre; the pose was a quotation (the Sibyl is Domenichino's, the Hebe is Kauffman's); and the result was a portrait that flattered by association and by the bare arms that Catherine II disliked.

The Sibyl is the case. Painted in Naples in 1791–92 after Domenichino's Cumaean Sibyl in the Borghese, with Emma Hart as the model, in a turban and a striped shawl with a scroll of Greek, it was the picture the painter carried across Europe — shown in Vienna, in Petersburg, in Berlin, in Paris in 1802 — as her demonstration piece: the proof that a portraitist could paint a history subject, that the Queen's painter could do an Old Master. She says in the Souvenirs that she valued it above everything she painted in Italy, and she kept it until her death. The modern viewer is more likely to prefer the same sitter as a Bacchante with tambourine and loose hair, which is simply a beautiful woman, painted fast, by a painter who liked her face and not her conversation.

The costumed portraits also tell the exile's economics. A portrait à l'antique was a portrait in the latest taste, and the latest taste was the thing the exile had to sell: in Vienna, Petersburg and Berlin she was the Paris fashion in person, and the shawls, turbans, tunics and Roman sandals that she draped her sitters in were, like the manner itself, French goods on a foreign market. She was paid accordingly — the Russian prices were the highest of her life, and she left Petersburg with a fortune invested in the Russian funds — and she paid, in turn, the price of the market: a sameness in the Russian work that the best pictures escape and the rest do not.

XII. The economy of exile: the émigrée as a firm

Since the Souvenirs are candid about money, the painter's finances can be summarised, and they explain much. In Paris before 1789 she earned, she says, a million livres — an enormous sum, of which her husband took most; she left with a hundred louis. In Italy she lived, at first, on commissions from the Polish and Russian grandees who wintered in Rome and from the Neapolitan court, and she was paid in gold; she says the Naples year was the most profitable of the Italian ones. In Vienna the Liechtensteins, the Esterházys and the Polish magnates paid in florins; in Petersburg the prices went to 3,000 roubles for a full-length, and a hundred portraits in six years made her, by her own account, rich — she describes the Russian nobility as the most generous clients she ever had and Petersburg as the city in which she was happiest. The money was invested; the 1806 bankruptcy of a Russian banker cost her part of it; the Louveciennes house was bought on the rest.

The point of this is not gossip but the nature of the œuvre: the exile's work was made to be sold, in a series of markets the painter entered as a famous foreigner, and its consistency — the same pose, the same shawl, the same parted lips in Naples, Vienna and Petersburg — is the consistency of a product. She was, in this respect, the century's most successful travelling painter, the successor of Rosalba (who had gone to Paris and Vienna) and of Liotard (who had gone everywhere), and the predecessor of Lawrence's Congress of Vienna tour. What distinguishes her is that she travelled as a political refugee and a royal partisan, and that the faces she carried were the faces of a cause: every portrait of a Russian countess in a Paris shawl was a small act of loyalty to the world the shawl came from.

A last note on the network. The émigré world of the 1790s was a web of correspondents, and the painter's Souvenirs show her moving along it: the Comte de Vaudreuil in London, the Polignacs in Vienna, the Duc de Polignac's daughter-in-law the Duchesse de Guiche in Petersburg, the Abbé Delille in Basle, Ménageot in Rome, the Princesse Kurakin, the Esterházy who had known the Queen, the King of Poland who had loved the Queen's mother. The sitters of the exile were the sitters of Versailles displaced, or their hosts; the painter's address-book was the old regime in diaspora, and the portraits are its group picture.

XIII. London, Switzerland, and the long Restoration

Paris under the Consulate was not her world: 'the women wore Greek dresses but had lost their grace', the society was new, the Tuileries was Bonaparte's, and her pictures of the Queen hung in the Louvre among the confiscated property of the émigrés. She painted a few portraits — the Murats, the singer Grassini, the dancer Vestris — and left in 1803 for London, where she stayed until 1805: the Prince of Wales (the portrait is lost), the Duchess of Dorset, the Perceval family, Byron's mother-in-law, the émigré society of the French princes; she met Reynolds's ghost in his works, and was unimpressed by the English ('the men are cold, the women sit still'), and the English, who had Lawrence, were less impressed than the Russians had been. Then Switzerland (1807–09), where she visited Madame de Staël at Coppet and painted her as Corinne on the Cape of Misenum — the last great portrait, of a great writer, by a painter who had, by then, become a figure from the past; she painted landscape in pastel at Chamonix and wrote the Souvenirs de mon voyage en Suisse for her friend the Comtesse Vincent.

From 1809 the life was Paris in winter and Louveciennes in summer: a house bought near the Marly aqueduct, a salon in the rue Saint-Lazare, the company of the Restoration — she painted the Duchesse de Berry in 1824, the Bourbons' last fashionable sitter — and a gradual withdrawal from the easel. The husband, from whom she had been divorced in 1794 (a formality to protect his property; he had petitioned for her return), died in 1813; Julie in 1819; her brother Étienne, the playwright, in 1820; the nieces, Caroline Rivière and Eugénie Le Brun, became her family and her editors. The Souvenirs were dictated and assembled in the 1830s and published in 1835–37 — a success, immediately, and a source ever since. She painted, by her own count, her last portrait in 1835: Madame Baudin. She died in Paris on 30 March 1842, at eighty-six, having outlived the Queen by forty-nine years, and was buried at Louveciennes under a stone inscribed, at her request, Ici, enfin, je repose — 'Here, at last, I rest.'