privileged classes, fell. But Louis called to power near as good a man, worthy banker Neckar. In an unfortunate hour for the Royal house, and against the will of the king, be it credited, and to the bewilderment of Neckar, the nation having gone mad with enthusiasm over the prospect of an alliance with Britain's revolted American colonies, war was declared against England, France undertaking not to conclude peace until the colonies were free. The success of the revolted colonies made the Revolution in France a certainty. The fall of Neckar and the setting up of the reckless and incompetent Calonne over the destinies of France brought the shout of the Democracy to the gardens of the king. Vigée Le Brun's picture of the dandified man certainly does not show him a leader of great enterprises. His reckless extravagance satisfied the nobles; it brought bankruptcy stalking to the doors of the king's palace. The distress and sufferings of the people became unbearable. The miserable scandal of the diamond necklace added to the discredit of the queen. The Royal family and the Court sank further in the people's respect.

As for Vigée Le Brun, she was come into her kingdom. And it is during those twenty years, from shortly after her marriage until she was forty, that her best and most brilliant portraiture belongs, before the hardness and dryness of her later style showed signs of the decay of her powers.

PLATE V.—THE TWO ELDER CHILDREN OF MARIE ANTOINETTE—THE FIRST DAUPHIN (born 1781, died 1789) AND THE MADAME ROYALE

(At Versailles)

The little Dauphin of four years, and his seven-year-old sister, the Madame Royale, seated on a bank, the boy's hat thrown at his feet upon the flower-strewn ground—a work in which Vigée Le Brun's colour-sense, her fine arrangement, and her feeling for style reach to their highest flight. The handsome boy was mercifully taken at the dawn of the Revolution; the girl was to know all its terrors.

To its earliest, freshest years belongs the first portrait that Vigée Le Brun painted, in her twenty-fourth year (1779) of Marie Antoinette, in which the young queen is seen with a large basket, and dressed in a satin gown, holding a rose in her hand—painted the year after the birth of her eldest child, the Madame Royale. Here is no hint of the tragedy that was to overwhelm the handsome young daughter of Austria; all was as yet but gaiety and roses and sunshine and pleasant airs and the glamour that hovers about a throne. But there are signs of the imperious temper of her house, combined with the levity and frivolity of manners, which were so early to make her unpopular.

Vigée Le Brun was to paint her royal mistress close on thirty times during the next ten years, until the prison doors shut upon the Royal house of France; and there grew up between the two women a subtle and charming friendship that was to make the talented woman a dogged and convinced royalist to her dying day—indeed, the temperament of women needs small incense towards the worshipping of idols.

Vigée Le Brun was rarely more happy in her art than in several of the many portraits she painted of herself about this time—more particularly the two famous pictures of herself with her little daughter. "The Marie Antoinette with the Rose" is redolent still of the eighteenth-century France—the siècle Louis Quinze. In Vigée Le Brun's portrait of herself and her child we see in full career the Greek ideals that were come upon France—a France weary of light trifling with life, and of mere butterfly flitting from flower to flower; here is that crying back to the antique spirit that was leavening the middle-class of France which was about to claim dominion over the land and to step to the foot of the throne and usurp the sceptre and diadem of her ancient line of kings as the Third Estate; and to come to power with violent upheaval, wading to the throne through blood and terror. Here we see Vigée Le Brun, royalist, glorifying motherhood, her arms and shoulders bare in chaste nudity, her body scantily attired in the simple purity of Greek robes, her child in her embrace.

Vigée Le Brun painted another portrait of herself and her little girl-child; and she painted both, fortunately for her fame, when her skill was at its increase. They stand out, with all their limitations, pure and exquisite as the Madonna and Child of Italy's finest achievement; for they were painted by a woman of genius with the passionate love of a child that is the wondrous heritage of woman; none the less religious in that it apes no show of religion. We see the age of free thought stating the innate religion of free thought; as Renaissance Italy painted paganism in religious disguise with the innate irreligion of its day.

In all her portraiture one is struck by the fact that Vigée Le Brun took much pains to arrange the draperies in what she considered picturesque fashion rather than that she painted the ordinary gowns of her day as her sitters wore them on entering her studio. And we have her own word for it in her Souvenirs (wherein the careful record of each picture that she painted may be found) that the dress of most women of the time seemed ugly to her—as it does to so many artists, generally not the best, in all times—indeed, she used every ounce of tact that she possessed in order to "arrange" the draperies. She sternly set her face against the use of powder and paint that the fashion of her century put upon complexions even of the most delicate beauties; and she always, when she could, arranged the hair of the women sitters. She tells, not without pride, how, having persuaded the beautiful Duchess of Grammont-Caderousse to put off paint and powder, and to allow her to arrange her jet-black hair, drawing it down over the forehead and separating it over the brow and arranging it in irregular little curls, the duchess went to the theatre as she was, and created the fashion thereby, in spite of the fact that Vigée Le Brun could never persuade the queen to give in to her, Marie Antoinette replying to all her beguilings: "I shall be the last to follow the fashion; I do not wish them to say that I am trying to hide my huge forehead."

Marie Antoinette was beginning to realise that all France did not fawn upon her with the courtier's bended shoulder or pretty speech.

IV

MARIE ANTOINETTE

In her twenty-seventh year (1782) Vigée Le Brun made a journey into Flanders with her husband, who had gone thither picture-dealing. The works of the Flemish masters that she there saw had a marked effect upon the increase of her art.

She saw at Anvers the famous "Chapeau de paille" by Rubens; and had revealed to her the beauties of a sun-flooded figure, with the face painted in the golden glow of reflected lights under the shadow flung down over it by a large hat. This canvas by Rubens clearly inspired her to the painting of the portrait of herself in a straw hat, where she stands bathed in the sunlight, her palette in her hand. The painting of the flesh of the pretty face is exquisite, and in spite of intense finish is broadly conceived and rich and glowing in colour. The clumsy drawing of the hand that holds the palette is the only defect in this, one of her masterpieces. The picture has the added interest of revealing to us how Vigée Le Brun set her palette. The thing is thrilling with life; and the little feminine conceit of wearing her black wrap is quaintly delightful.

Thenceforth her art has an added sense of style, a fuller statement of atmosphere; in her handling of paint and employment of colour she was soon to reach the very height of her achievement.