Sacred Parallelogram

‘Marie-Antoinette en gaulle’ (1783) by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.

In February​ 1803 the Monthly Magazine offered a backhanded endorsement of women artists in its regular ‘Retrospect of Fine Arts’: ‘In an age so generally marked by the frivolity and dissipation of our women of rank, the few who by the cultivation of the fine arts emancipate themselves from these fashionable fetters, and display the elegance and taste so fascinating in the female sex, are entitled to peculiar honours.’ In August, the ‘Retrospect’ was prepared to be more generous, conceding that ‘the superior taste and talent which has been displayed by the females of the present age, in the various departments of the fine arts, is universally admitted.’ Even if it was universally admitted, the success of women in the arts depended on more than talent. They had to navigate a society constantly on the lookout for any lapse from those standards of ‘elegance and taste’ on which their ‘fascinating’ status depended and ever alert to any sign of ‘dissipation’. For all of which, the late 18th and early 19th centuries did see women artists succeed at an unprecedented level. Many of them are largely forgotten. The ‘exquisite productions’ of the Countess of Mansfield, which the Monthly Magazine admired, have not loomed large in art history. The three women whose work and reputation have survived best are Angelica Kauffman, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and, to a lesser extent, Maria Cosway, who was the subject of the Monthly’s second article. They were contemporaries, though Kauffman, born in 1741, was the oldest by half a generation and in many ways the pioneer, one of only two women among the founding members of the Royal Academy.*

They knew or knew of one another. Le Brun and the Swiss-born Kauffman were friends, while the younger Cosway began her career, as her critical friend James Northcote wrote, ‘filled with the highest expectations of being … another Angelica Kauffman’. Le Brun and Cosway coincided several times in Paris, where Cosway cut a lesser figure. She was scathing in her diary about her French rival, who probably had no idea of being in competition with her. They all travelled and exhibited internationally to varying degrees of acclaim. Their careers required constant, delicate calibration to keep the balance between personal reputation, artistic success and the need to earn a living, for none was independently wealthy or ‘a woman of rank’. Much depended on men, and it is notable that all three had supportive fathers and disastrous husbands who spent their money, failed to nurture their careers and in the end became burdensome. Marital status, so useful for reputation management, brought few other benefits. Richard Cosway refused to allow Maria to practise professionally; Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun was only too keen for his wife to sell her work so that he could pocket the proceeds; and whatever happened in Kauffman’s brief first marriage was so upsetting that she was never able to talk about it. Her late second marriage was to a much older man who had been chosen by her ageing father to take over from him. It seems to have been happy enough, but we cannot know as Kauffman took care to burn all her papers before she died.

Of the three it was Cosway, born in 1760, who had the strangest start in life. Her parents, Charles and Isabella Hadfield, had settled in Florence where they ran an inn, Carlo’s, on the left bank of the Arno, which catered for the flow of Grand Tourists from England and Scotland. Even the most sophisticated of travellers might be homesick and the painter Thomas Jones was one of those who found that the ‘increasing phantom’ of loneliness disappeared at the inn ‘where we lived in the English fashion’. In time the family owned two more inns in Florence and their visitors’ books reflect the social and intellectual range of the tourists. Boswell and Gibbon stayed, as did the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, George Romney and Joseph Wright of Derby. Travellers who meet their fellow countrymen and women abroad often strike up friendships they would be unlikely to form at home and the Hadfields made connections to which no innkeeper’s family in England could aspire. Maria Louisa Catherine Cecilia was their fifth child. The previous four had all died suddenly, murdered, it transpired, by a maidservant who, caught on the point of sending this next ‘pretty little creature’ to heaven, explained that she was doing ‘a good act’, presumably under the impression that the child of Protestants would be better off in limbo. The nurse was ‘confined for life’, Maria survived, and Charles Hadfield decided she and all future children would be raised as Catholics to protect them from anti-Protestant malice (though, perhaps with his eventual return to England in mind, he had Maria baptised a Protestant). Her English godparents, guests no doubt at Carlo’s, were Sir Brook Bridges and Lady Lucy Boyle, the first strands in the web of useful connections which made much of her later career possible. It also established the uneasy duality that characterised her life; neither Italian nor entirely English, she was compromised at different times by her sincere Catholicism and her supposed Protestantism.

Four more children followed without incident and Maria grew up in a cosmopolitan milieu, speaking Italian more fluently than English. She soon showed a talent for music, which was encouraged by her father, while her artistic abilities were developed under the tutelage of Johan Zoffany, who was in Florence to work on his masterpiece of 1772-77, The Tribuna of the Uffizi. This ne plus ultra of Grand Tour pictures, an epic conversation piece set in Bernardo Buontalenti’s octagonal gallery, at the heart of the Uffizi, incorporates meticulous copies of dozens of works of painting and sculpture as well as 22 portraits of the most distinguished cognoscenti of the day. It was perhaps watching this monumental piece in progress that encouraged Maria, much later, to think she could produce engravings of every work in the Louvre. Such detailed copying, precise to the point of finicky, was not her forte, however, as Joseph Wright realised when he stayed at the Hadfields’ inn on his way home from a tour of southern Italy. He spent three days arguing about art with the innkeeper’s young daughter ‘in a manner’, she wrote, ‘which opened my mind and taste for greater things’. She began to look beyond Zoffany to Joshua Reynolds and the dawning Romanticism among her contemporaries. She was sociable as well as talented, albeit somewhat bumptious after having been indulged in everything by the father who had so narrowly rescued her from death. Diane Boucher’s sympathetic and thorough biography, the first monograph on Cosway, conveys her subject’s bounce and lovability as well as the poignancy of a turbulent career and a life whose conclusion was as unlikely in its way as its beginning.

The first blow came with her father’s death just as Maria was about to go to Rome to pursue her studies. Her brother William travelled with her and she spent her time there working and mixing with artists including Pompeo Batoni and Anton Raphael Mengs. She met and formed a lasting friendship with John Soane, but it was Henry Fuseli whose ‘extraordinary visions struck my fancy’. He inspired some of the best of her later work. Without her father, however, the family business did not flourish and her mother, of whom nobody, including Maria, seems to have had much good to say, decided to return to England. For Isabella it was a homecoming; for her daughter it was exile. Maria never quite forgave her mother and she later claimed never to have been happy out of Italy. As well as the usual complaints of foreigners about the weather, food and soot, her Catholicism was a liability in London. The Hadfields arrived in the autumn of 1779, only months before the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots broke out in the capital. The family was not directly affected. They were as usual in possession of excellent connections with ‘the first people of fashion’, including Reynolds and Kauffman, and they settled in Hanover Square. It was an uneasy household. Money was short and Maria and her mother were not on good terms. Isabella remained a Protestant and Maria felt she had to protect her younger sisters against a hostile religious climate. The obvious way to resolve these complications was a husband and in 1780 she met Richard Cosway, marrying him the following year.

In Nollekens and His Times, one of the most gleefully spiteful biographies ever written, the antiquary J.T. Smith describes Cosway, whom he had known, as ‘a well-made little man … very much like a monkey in his face’ and ‘ridiculously foppish’. If few contemporaries said the same in print, it was a not uncommon opinion. Cosway was nearly eighteen years older than his bride. An established artist, he was a Royal Academician who specialised in flattering portrait miniatures. Smith went to the trouble of finding and reproducing an ‘extremely rare’ and unkind caricature of him by Robert Dighton as ‘the Macaroni Painter’. Northcote later claimed that Maria ‘always despised’ Cosway. That would seem to be an exaggeration, but it was, if not exactly a marriage of convenience, certainly a convenient marriage. He was in love; she was pretty and talented; her family needed money and he was prepared to give it to them. Isabella was also more conscious than her daughter of the gossip she would attract and she did not want her to be ‘talked of as Angelica was’. So, as Maria put it, ‘his offer was accepted, my mother’s wishes gratified and I married tho’ under age.’

At first Maria was kept socially under wraps. For a year she worked on her English, toned down her ‘foreign’ manners, studied ‘the taste and character of the Nation’ and learned the significance of the annual exhibition at the academy where artists attracted the broadest audience and hoped to make their names. She had three pictures in the first exhibition after her marriage in 1781. Thus, when she came out into society, she could be presented as a respectable and accomplished young woman. Her husband chose to cast her primarily as a musician. It is not clear why, beyond chauvinism, he was so unwilling for her to work as a professional artist. His insistence that she should not sell her paintings not only hampered her career but largely accounts for her later obscurity. Her biography has been folded into Lives of her husband and Boucher gives a dismaying list of the 42 works Maria showed at the Royal Academy. Thirty-seven are ‘untraced’ though some are known through engravings.

In late Georgian London, painters, actors and the aristocracy moved in the same circles, if not quite so freely as they did at the inn in Florence. Boucher sets Maria in a milieu where the warmth and sociability of her nature, as well as her fashionably delicate prettiness, made her a natural fit. The Cosways’ several homes were all within or close to what Sydney Smith later called ‘the sacred parallelogram’ between Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Regent Street and Hyde Park. Here, Smith claimed, was ‘more intelligence and ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world had ever collected in such a space before’. Maria’s soirées furnished ‘wonderment for the table-talk of the town’. Visitors included Horace Walpole, Richard Sheridan, Charles James Fox and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. These were the stars of the Whig set that revolved around the Prince of Wales, whose home at Carlton House was a few minutes’ walk from the Cosways. Not far in the other direction was Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts in the Strand, where the latest art books and prints were sold and artists met their customers. The patronage of ‘Prinnie’, who commissioned dozens of miniatures from Richard, brought prestige, while Maria suffered the fate of any woman who spoke to him for more than five minutes of being rumoured to be his mistress. She continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy and had some support, and possibly tuition, from Kauffman, who made at least one drawing of her. One of her most successful surviving paintings is Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, which she showed at the academy in 1782. The duchess was a famous beauty, and much painted, but it was Cosway’s image of her, apparently flying out of a night sky, surrounded by clouds and stars as she bears in on the viewer, that her son later felt to be ‘the only likeness of her that reminds me of her countenance’. The crescent moon in her tiara was complemented by lines from Spenser’s Faerie Queen and the image earns the implicit comparison with Gloriana, as Georgiana seems to break out of the picture plane, lovely and yet unearthly.

Eleven years​ later Le Brun painted Princess Karoline of Lichtenstein as Iris, goddess of the rainbow. Karoline is similarly but more shyly airborne, side-on to the viewer and looking flushed, as if it’s a bit of a struggle to stay up. Whether Le Brun got the idea for the picture from Cosway is not known, but the portrait is unusual in her work and she would certainly have known the image of Georgiana from engravings. It is a rare instance in which a comparison between their work is to Cosway’s advantage. The elder by five years, Le Brun was more naturally talented, better trained and more self-assured in dealing with the peculiar difficulties that beset women artists. On both sides of the Channel, the highest genre – history painting – was thought to be beyond them and as they were not allowed to study the nude, except from casts, classical compositions were difficult. Maria Cosway’s occasional attempts to work on the heroic scale were not successful. Portraiture was acceptable but the conventions that hedged the portrayal of women were strict, especially on the Continent. Le Brun’s image of Karoline was considered risqué because, beneath her reddish-brown gown, her feet are bare. In her engagingly conversational memoir, Souvenirs, Le Brun records that the princess’s husband responded to complaints from his scandalised grandparents by placing a pair of elegant shoes under the frame and explaining they had just dropped off. Earlier in her career Le Brun’s images of women attracted more damaging criticism. A self-portrait with her young daughter, Julie, shown at the Salon in 1787, depicted her smiling with her lips slightly parted, a breach of academic convention.

However, it was her portrait of the queen in 1783 that caused the greatest scandal. In Marie-Antoinette en gaulle, the volatile concepts of womanhood and monarchy were brought together in an unstable compound. The queen was shown in a fashionable white muslin dress of extreme simplicity which looked, to most people at the time, as if she was in her underwear. This is not an uncommon reaction to new fashions in women’s dress, but Marie-Antoinette’s portraits were the icons of the Ancien Régime and this was construed as blasphemy, a PR disaster on such a scale that Le Brun had it removed from the Salon. She painted Marie-Antoinette thirty times and was in effect her official portraitist, which put her in danger when the revolution came. By the time she painted Karoline in Vienna, she had been in exile for four years after leaving Paris with her nine-year-old daughter on 5 October 1789, the day the French king and queen were brought to the capital from Versailles. Her escape is dealt with factually and briefly in Souvenirs, a single episode in a life and career shaped by war and revolutions, recalled in its final years with wit and sangfroid.

Souvenirs was first published in Le Brun’s lifetime in three volumes between 1835 and 1837. This much abridged edition is based on a translation of 1880 with some additions and a rearrangement of the later chapters. It makes no reference to the illustrated French edition of 2015. In its boiled-down form the memoir has a fragmentary quality but its value is further undermined by Anne Higonnet’s oddly ambivalent introduction. On the one hand, she claims for Le Brun the status of the ‘first modern woman artist … acclaimed in her own lifetime’ – an accolade which belongs to Kauffman, if to anyone. On the other, she seems mistrustful of her readers’ judgment and her subject’s character. Having advised that historic memoirs ‘must be read sceptically and contextually’, she takes Le Brun to task for being ‘oblivious to the profoundly egalitarian principles of the revolution’. Given that Le Brun and her daughter got out of Paris by the skin of their teeth while revolutionaries were throwing sulphur into the basement of their house to try to set it on fire, it is understandable that she does not dwell on their ideals. Higonnet finds fault with Le Brun on many grounds: for being fond of Marie-Antoinette, who had sat for her so often, and for mourning her death, as did many people including those who supported the revolution but found the treatment of the queen excessively brutal and misogynistic; for not recognising that the fabrics worn by her sitters ‘were forcibly imported from colonised India and Kashmir’; and for being on many points ‘obtuse’. In sum, ‘she did not understand the relationship between her historical and autobiographical stories.’ Few people ever do. Historians are there to explain these things.

The joy of Le Brun’s memoir is its immediacy: the eyewitness accounts of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand and Catherine the Great; of an over-excited Beaumarchais breaking all the windows of the theatre at a performance of The Marriage of Figaro; of the last ball at Versailles, where the young men refused to dance with the queen (‘I thought her very agitated’). Souvenirs plays down the dangers and the sorrows of an extraordinary life and career with what Higonnet takes for complacency but might be read as gallantry, and at times comedy. Le Brun is not too vain to describe the time she sat down on her palette in a white silk dress, or her regret for the decision, when painting the young Miss Pitt as Hebe with an eagle, to borrow a live eagle from Cardinal de Bernis. Not used to being indoors, the bird was ‘furious’ throughout the sitting and refused to keep still. The reader is also brought close to the disciplined reality of her professional life in her ‘Advice on the Painting of Portraits’ with which this edition concludes. She recommends the artist ‘be ready half an hour before the model arrives’, with all the paints prepared, work with a mirror behind them, and ‘before you begin, talk to your model.’ Other tips include: ‘Study Van Dyck’; remember it is ‘essential to study the ear and to place it in the correct position’; and bear in mind that German ears tend to be ‘a little too high’.

Le Brun​ and Cosway had certain things in common. Both were the child prodigies of adoring fathers who died too soon and Le Brun, too, was propelled into marriage at the age of twenty. Her father, Louis Vigée, was an artist of some distinction, and a witty and tolerant parent who taught his daughter by example (‘all day long I used to dabble with his pencils’). He was replaced by an uncongenial stepfather, but by then Le Brun, who had been something of an ugly duckling ‘with an enormous forehead’ and a ‘thin, pale face’, realised that she had ‘become pretty’ and was building a professional career. ‘I had no anxieties for my future, as I earned a good deal of money.’ It was a combination to terrify any respectable mother and Mme Vigée was keen to get her daughter a husband before all this confident independence made her unmarriageable. Thus, very much à contrecoeur, she married the painter and art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun. Looking back on her marriage, she is remarkably charitable. Le Brun, she writes, was not ‘a bad man’: ‘his disposition was a great mixture of sweetness and vivacity; he was good-tempered with all – in a word, he was very amiable; but his headstrong passion for low women, added to a love of gambling, brought about the loss of his fortune and mine.’ There were warning signs. Le Brun insisted the marriage be kept secret for several weeks as he was in the middle of a business deal with a wealthy Dutch collector and had promised to marry his daughter. The initial secrecy left plenty of time for the Vigées’ friends, who knew Le Brun was a suitor, to tell Élisabeth that she would be making a terrible mistake in marrying him, recounting ‘several things’ about him which she had not known. There was no help for it, however, and while her mother wept – the more so when she found out he wasn’t as rich as she thought – her daughter accepted her lot and was happy enough with her ‘beloved painting’ to console her.

Paris under the Ancien Régime was not as socially fluid as London, but it was not as rigidly stratified, at least for artists and the intelligentsia, as is sometimes suggested. Scientists, painters, artists and philosophers frequented Versailles and from 1778 onwards Le Brun was often at court. It was there that her path first crossed Maria Cosway’s. When the Cosways were in Paris in 1786, Richard presented Louis XVI with a miniature of the Prince of Wales and the king reciprocated with a collection of Gobelins tapestries. The French connoisseur Baron d’Hancarville reported that ‘Mr Coswai’ was a great success and found himself unable to express ‘the sensation that was made here by the intelligence, the good manners and the talents of Madame Coswai’. They visited the studios of Jacques-Louis David and of Le Brun, whom Maria found ‘so obliging’ that, as she later confided to her diary, she was almost able to overlook her ‘weak, poor, cheap, common, badly drawn’ work. For her, the most consequential event of the French trip was her meeting with the recently widowed Thomas Jefferson. While Richard worked on his portrait commissions, Jefferson showed Maria around Paris, and they began a lifelong amitié amoureuse. Boucher handles this much discussed relationship with sympathy and realism. There would have been time and opportunity for an actual affair but ‘no overwhelming evidence’ exists that there was one. Too much was at stake, especially for Maria. Richard Cosway, however, seems to have become uneasy about these long days of sight-seeing à deux, and was soon insisting they leave Paris. Jefferson saw them off and returned home ‘more dead than alive’. By this time comparisons were being made between her and Le Brun, at least on the English side. One critic commented in 1783 that ‘if the Parisians boast of their Madame Le Brun we have our Maria Cosway [who] promises to be one of the luminaries of the approaching age.’ But Cosway was not an artist of equal stature and the uncharacteristically spiteful outburst in her diary smacks more of jealousy than of critical judgment.

What she might have accomplished with better training and professional practice is questionable. It is possible, however, to make one telling comparison. In the 1780s both women lit on the same model for a self-portrait to embody the balancing act of their lives as artists and as women, self-possessed, poised within the bounds of ‘elegance’ and free from ‘dissipation’. Rubens’s Le Chapeau de paille, almost certainly a portrait of his future sister-in-law Susanna Lunden, was painted in about 1622-25. Cosway’s version of it is more or less a copy. The substitution of her own softer features and a more modest décolletage are the chief alterations and they come at a cost. The power of Lunden’s oblique gaze and firm features is lost. Le Brun’s picture is not only more technically accomplished; it is a reinvention. She seems to have worked from memory rather than detailed copies and to have creatively misremembered the original. Despite its popular title, the hat in Rubens’s picture is not straw, but black felt. (Possibly the French poil for felt became at some point paille for straw.) Le Brun apparently forgot this and recalled its subject in a straw hat, filtering ‘the different lights given by the sun, daylight and the sun’s rays’ to cast dappled shade on a delicate complexion. She painted herself accordingly. Unlike Lunden, Le Brun looks straight out of the picture, holding her palette and brushes, the beautiful woman and the professional artist in one. Le Brun’s painting is now in the National Gallery in London, as is the Rubens, to which it makes a worthy complement.

After her escape​ from Paris, Le Brun began her Wanderjahre. She spent twelve years in Italy, Austria and Russia where, to Higonnet’s implied annoyance, she ‘earned an excellent living wherever she went by painting individualist portraits of the most autocratic nobility in Europe’. Life in exile had its compensations. She enjoyed the brilliance of émigré society in Italy, and she could now keep the money she earned. At the same time, she had to read the lists of her friends sent to the guillotine during the Terror until she could no longer bear to look at the papers. Cosway also left home in 1790, leaving her husband and a new-born daughter, Louisa, in London. She spent four years on the move, diverting around revolutionary France and travelling via Switzerland to Venice. Though she left on the grounds of ill-health, it is not clear why she stayed away so long. It puzzled contemporaries. Her friend and admirer Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot who was godfather to her daughter, was distraught at the idea of the abandoned baby, while the less charitable Hester Thrale Piozzi was scandalised at her ‘madding all over Europe’ (supposedly in pursuit of the castrato Luigi Marchesi, with whom she appeared to be infatuated). Boucher, who titles this section of her biography ‘Breakdown’, holds back from a definitive explanation for what may have been some combination of post-natal depression, marital disharmony and a persistent sense of displacement in England. As Cosway wrote to Jefferson, the ‘caprices’ of the English – always referred to as ‘them’ – ‘disgusted’ her. She came back eventually, but the best years of her career and her marriage were over. Money was tight. Britain was at war and the patronage of the Prince of Wales, though prestigious, was not lucrative as he seldom settled his account. Banned from selling her paintings, Cosway often could not be bothered to finish them and although she was a skilled engraver it was a hard way to make a living.

Two years after her return, Louisa died at the age of six and Richard added to his wife’s distress by insisting on having the child embalmed and the body kept in the drawing room. Jefferson now saw from Maria’s letters that ‘her gayety was gone and her mind entirely placed on the world to come.’ Her faith was her chief solace. The Descent from the Cross (c.1799-1800) focuses on the anguished face of the Virgin looking heavenward. In 1802, however, her life took yet another turn. After the Peace of Amiens safe travel between England and France resumed. Cosway and Le Brun were among the thousands of émigrés, friends, families and tourists crossing the Channel in opposite directions. It was Le Brun’s first visit to England, and she was not charmed, despite being at once commissioned to paint the Prince of Wales, to the annoyance of less favoured British artists. She was surprised and disappointed that there were no public art galleries and it was a contrast also remarked on by the English, who were fascinated by the collection at the Louvre. It was in hopes of benefiting from the popular interest that Cosway conceived her over-ambitious plan to engrave every picture. While that was a failure, she was personally a success, acting as a guide for her English friends, effecting useful introductions and resuming an acquaintance with Joseph Fesch, Napoleon’s uncle. At his instigation she became an intermediary in the volatile politics of the peace, writing to her friend Paoli on behalf of Napoleon to attempt a reconciliation with the consulate.

When the war resumed the following year, Cosway, to the consternation of Paoli and others, stayed in France. Many sources of unease and grief now seemingly coalesced to mark the effective end of her life in England. As a girl she had often said she would like to enter a convent and she now found an analogous vocation. She decided to set up a Catholic school and devote herself to the improvement of girls’ education. Her first attempt, with Fesch’s help, was in Lyon. In a letter to the Abbé Courbon, Fesch describes the woman who had developed out of the kittenish little thing Richard Cosway fell in love with into a person of ‘much intelligence … much experience of society and much tact’. She was also, Fesch added on a note of warning, ‘little accustomed to strong contradictions’. But in Lyon she was seen as an Englishwoman and the wife of a Protestant, so this first venture failed. She retreated to Lombardy and set up her school in Lodi. Travelling dutifully back to London when she heard that Richard was ill, she took 24 days to circumnavigate war zones, travelling through the Alps on a horse ‘the size of a sheep’ after the two men hired to carry her in a litter declined the job on the grounds that she was too fat, a ‘colossus’. Much of this part of her life is known from her letters to Annette Prodon, her deputy at the school. Like Le Brun, Cosway makes anecdotes of what must have been severe and sometimes terrifying trials. At last, with her husband dead and his affairs settled in England, she settled permanently in Italy. Soane helped her to establish her school on a sound financial footing, and it survived in various forms until 1978, on the site now occupied by the Fondazione Maria Cosway, its archives a valuable resource for Boucher. The school’s success was recognised by her elevation to baroness of the Austrian Empire. Her last years seem to have been contented and Prodon became an adopted daughter and her heir.

By the time of her death in 1838, Cosway was long forgotten in the English art world. An assessment of her career in 1812 spoke of her already in the past tense, concurring in the general opinion that ‘she was not regular in the cultivation of the pencil, she painted by fits and by flights.’ Maria did not disagree. In part she blamed her husband, as did the artist and diarist Joseph Farington, who thought that ‘had Cosway allowed her to sell her works’ she would have accomplished more. Her final assessment of her career, however, is touchingly self-deprecating: ‘The first pictures I exhibited made my reputation … the novelty & my age contributed more than the real Merit.’ Le Brun also survived yet further years of war. She returned to France and settled at Louveciennes, in the Île-de-France, where her home was raided and looted twice; first in 1814 by the Prussians, who broke in while she was asleep, and again during the Hundred Days’ War, this time by the British, who stole some of her favourite possessions. She was one of many French who questioned the price they had paid for their imperial victories, all now reversed, and she was not alone in finding the restoration of the Bourbons a relief, though she would live to see another revolution in 1830. She and her husband had long since drifted apart but she grieved for his death in 1813 and much more for that of Julie in 1819. All the while she continued to paint. Her work was still her most reliable source of distraction and consolation. Like Cosway, the comfort of her later years came from the love and support of younger women. The ‘care and devotion’ of her two nieces threw ‘a charm over my existence’.