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Plate 06 / 10
Original work · Work 06
Public domainComtesse de la Châtre
White muslin, a gaze that meets yours without flinching: a countess painted in the very year the Bastille fell. Portraitist to Marie-Antoinette, Vigée Le Brun fled France with her daughter and spent twelve years painting Europe — Vienna, Rome, Naples, Saint Petersburg — and more than a thousand sitters. Posterity kept her 'charm' and forgot her technique, her prices and her exile.
Part of the 'Erased Masterpieces' curatorial series celebrating women artists restored to art history.