belongs the first portrait that Vigee
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.

Vigee 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.

Vigee 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 siecle Louis Quinze. In Vigee 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 Vigee 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.

Vigee 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 g