In 1778, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun met Marie Antoinette at the Royal palace in Versailles. The queen had heard of Le Brun’s talent and asked to paint her portrait. Marie Antoinette loved the way Le Brun painted her and from that point on, she was pretty much her official royal portrait painter. Le Brun painted 30 portraits of the queen. Almost as quickly as her star rose, her fortunes changed. In 1789, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was forced to flee France in a disguise and under the cover of darkness during the early stages of the French Revolution. Le Brun didn’t have the opulent life of luxury that revolutionaries despised, but she had worked her way up to become Marie Antoinette’s favorite portraitist and the French Revolution was not the ideal time and place for friends of the monarch.

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