From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

When her coach clattered on to Rome’s sampietrini in December 1789, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun – Marie Antoinette’s preferred painter and the most sought-after portraitist in France – had to borrow the money to settle her fare. Two months earlier, she and her nineyear-old daughter, Julie, had escaped Paris by cover of night, disguised as peasants, imagining Jacobin spies in every corner. Vigée Le Brun had left France only twice before, and then with her husband, the noted art dealer Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun, when they were guests of the Belgian nobility. This time she was in exile, impoverished and single.

It is a fascinating moment of turmoil and uncertainty in her story, far removed from the glitz and whimsy of Versailles and indicative of the sheer effort and strength of mind required of Vigée Le Brun to keep herself afloat. An artist less disciplined, and a person less congenitally self-assured, would simply have crumbled.

In these early days of her exile, she tells us in Souvenirs, the highly readable memoir she published in her eighties, she drew particular courage from the sight of a painting by Angelica Kauffman in the gallery of self-portraits at the Uffizi (her coachman had stopped briefly in Florence on the way to Rome). That Kauffman, ‘one of the glories of our sex’, had carved out a life and a glorious reputation in the Eternal City suggested to Vigée Le Brun that she herself might succeed there too: ‘I was extremely keen to meet her,’ she writes.

Indeed, during Vigée Le Brun’s three-month stay in Rome – then awash with classicalmad connoisseurs and aristocrats on the Grand Tour – she spent several evenings with Kauffman, noting their ‘long and interesting conversations’. Delving into Vigée Le Brun’s extraordinary life for Vigée Le Brun: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, I found the thought of these meetings and their evident camaraderie enchanting. Though more women than ever before were making their names as painters in the Age of Enlightenment, very few breached the profession’s uppermost echelons, as she and Kauffman had, and the sorts of establishment at which their male colleagues would have discussed their work were closed to them.

Kauffman and Vigée Le Brun must have felt a particular affinity, too. The similarities in their stories can feel startling: both were celebrated prodigies, taught and encouraged by their fathers; both made deleterious marriages to husbands who squandered their hard-won earnings. Both were court painters; both battled the Academy system to establish themselves and were subjected to a stream of salacious slander. Both adored music and were renowned for their conversation.

Vigée Le Brun requested an introduction to Kauffman the moment she arrived in Rome and the ambassador, Cardinal de Bernis – a protégé of Madame de Pompadour who shared Vigée Le Brun’s loyalty to the old Bourbons – was happy to oblige. The following night, he held a dinner in both artists’ honour, seating them either side of him at the table.

Many of Kauffman’s contemporaries refer to her kindnesses, so it is unsurprising to learn that she then invited Vigée Le Brun to visit her at home on the Via Sistina, where she lived with her second, less errant husband, the painter Antonio Zucchi. An inventory conducted on Kauffman’s death in 1807 allows us to envisage the evenings she and Vigée Le Brun spent together in delicious detail. The green silk wall coverings, striped sofa, Indian cane chairs and Flemish tapestry in her stanza di conversazione, for instance – where Kauffman also held her famous salons for upwards of 80 guests, which lasted until three o’clock in the morning. In pre-Revolutionary Paris, Vigée Le Brun’s own salons were also often so crowded, she tells us, ‘that the Maréchaux de France had to sit on the floor’.

In Kauffman’s apartments, Vigée Le Brun saw ‘a few paintings by the great artists’ – both adored Rubens and Raphael – and ‘several of her own works’. She doesn’t specify which, but we know that year Kauffman completed several fine portraits – the Countess Catherine Skavronska, for instance – and history paintings – notably Venus Persuading Helen to Love Paris, Death of Alcestis and Diomed and Cressida. Rome was then the centre of progressive history painting, which, unusually for a woman, was Kauffman’s main focus. Many of her portraits also cast her subjects in the role of a goddess or muse – Emma, Lady Hamilton, as Thalia, the Muse of Comedy in 1791, for example.

Vigée Le Brun had probably chosen to specialise in portraiture in honour of her father – a minor pastel portraitist who died when she was 13 – but also because she had to support her mother and brother, then her husband, and the genre was easily the most lucrative. After visiting Kauffman, though, she admits to finding ‘little satisfaction’ in portrait commissions and that the need to make money had ‘drained’ her. ‘I often pondered on this,’ she writes. ‘I can scarcely find four examples among my painting that really pleases me.’

As if in response, her work underwent an immediate and major shift, purposefully leaning towards the grand style of Kauffman’s portraits, and to mythology and history. The first painting she created in Rome (after her own self-portrait for the Uffizi) cast the British noblewoman Anne Pitt as the goddess Hebe, while Portrait of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, as the Cumaean Sibyl goes as far as to mirror Kauffman’s Uffizi self-portrait in composition and props. Vigée Le Brun was particularly proud of this painting, which she refers to as ‘the picture of a Sibyl […] after Lady Hamilton’ – in other words, a historical composition as opposed to a portrait. She kept it in her possession throughout her exile, likely as a showpiece.

Kauffman, who rendered the landscape backgrounds of her paintings in great detail, also had a part to play in the importance that Vigée Le Brun began to attach to landscape at this time. Her portrait Countess Maria Theresia Bucquoi, née Parr (1793), for instance, includes moss-covered rocks and waterfalls, probably inspired by the gardens of Tivoli in Rome, where Vigée Le Brun created pastel drawings.

It has sometimes been suggested that the women saw each other as rivals and that their Uffizi commissions were a ‘face-off ’. Certainly, Kauffman’s good friend Goethe publicly compared the two works and, as Kauffman expert Bettina Baumgärtel notes, various aristocrats in Rome seem to have found it amusing to have both women paint their portraits in quick succession, ‘as if to test who was the better of the two’. If there were a contest, she adds, it emanated from Vigée Le Brun, though, anxious and bewildered by the collapse of her world as she was, who could blame her succumbing to envy?

The image I’d prefer to leave you with, however, is quite different. A shared love of music (Kauffman was as outstanding a singer as she was a painter and Vigée Le Brun often sang duets with Marie Antoinette) led to an evening at the opera, to see the castrato Girolamo Crescentini. ‘He played the part of a woman, and he was wearing a large pannier, just like those seen at the court of Versailles,’ writes Vigée Le Brun, ‘which made us laugh a great deal.’

Lucy Davies’s book Vigée Le Brun: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat is published this month (National Gallery London).

From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.