Portrait of Princess Vlaminska (singer Cotelini?).

This 1790 portrait at the Museum of John Paul II Collection depicts a female sitter, possibly the singer Cotelini, during the turbulent year following the French Revolution’s outbreak. Vigée Le Brun had fled France in October 1789, and her 1790 portraits were painted during her early exile in Italy, where she quickly found new patrons. Vigée Le Brun was the most technically accomplished and socially successful woman painter of the eighteenth century, achieving membership of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1783 and a clientele that extended from the French royal family to the courts of Russia, Austria, and Italy during her decade of exile following the Revolution. Her portrait manner combined the neoclassical formal values of her training with a quality of feminine intimacy and emotional warmth that made her portraits of women and children especially celebrated. Her ability to make her sitters appear simultaneously dignified and approachable was the technical foundation of her social success.

The portrait shows Vigée Le Brun’s consistent technical mastery regardless of geographic location. Luminous skin tones and careful rendering of costume demonstrate the undiminished quality of her exile-period work.