Art Wednesday: Marie Antoinette and Her Children (1787), Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842).

On Wednesdays, I write about a piece of art that interests me.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was an accomplished artist from a young age who hobnobbed with French royalty, went on the run when they literally lost their heads, hung out with Catherine the Great in Russia, and spent time living in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, all before she turned 50.

It makes sense that artists are found in history's big stories. In the old days, if there was a royal sitting around, there was a painter to paint them. Before TV and movies, royals were virtually the only celebrities and an artist's canvas was the Instagram of the day. It was a symbiotic relationship, of course: artists needed money and the only two entities that had enough to blow on stuff like portraits were the crown and the church.

For Élisabeth Le Brun, the church didn't provide much, but the royal court was a source of great success. One of her chief patrons was Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France. Le Brun painted dozens of pictures of her. One of them, Marie-Antoinette in a Muslin Dress, caused a stir because it showed Marie in a basic dress that leaned towards being a nightgown. Scandalous.

Le Brun was good like that: she once drew criticism for painting a self portrait that showed her own teeth. You simply did not show smiling teeth in good art. Later in life, Catherine the Great would be disturbed by a portrait Le Brun did of Catherine's daughters, until Le Brun painted sleeves on the scandalously bare arms of the children.

But back to Marie Antoinette. Born in Austria, Marie was married at age 14 to Louis-Auguste, the heir to the French throne. The marriage was done to secure peace between the Habsburg Monarchy and the French, but it was bad news for Marie. During her marriage to Louis (now dubbed Louis XVI), she was unpopular with the French people and seen as a spendthrift who liked to throw money around while the people starved. Though there's no evidence that she ever said "Let them eat cake," her name and that phrase became shorthand for an out of touch elitist.

It was in this increasingly tense climate that Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted portrait after portrait of the French queen and the nobility.

After the Muslin Dress picture was ill received, Le Brun set to work on Marie Antoinette and Her Children, seen above. It's a big shift away from a solo portrait of a happy-go-lucky Marie. Instead, we have the doting mother with her children, happy at home. Bright reds and plenty of "royalty" and "responsibility" are spilled onto the canvas. One child draws back the curtain on an empty cradle, likely a reference to the fact that Marie had lost a child. The happy mother who has been through a lot. You couldn't hate this woman, right?

Wrong. There was plenty of hate in the air when the French Revolution got rolling a couple of years after this painting was done. The monarchy would be abolished in short order, blood would run in the streets, and tens of thousands would lose their heads at the guillotine. One of them was Marie Antoinette. She was executed in 1793, 10 months after her husband was himself beheaded.

But not Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. She wasn't royalty, but she wasn't dumb, either. Being known as a friend to the royal family isn't great when the masses are out for their blood.

Le Brun fled Paris and spent the next decade in exile. Her husband and others worked to get her off the counter-revolutionary blacklist, and she returned to Paris in 1802. The second half of her life was quaint and boring compared to the first. She wrote her memoirs and died in 1842 at age 86.