This picture has been identified with one exhibited by Marie-Victoire Lemoine in the Salon of 1796. It is a tribute by one female painter to another—the celebrated portraitist Vigée Le Brun, who had been closely associated with Marie Antoinette before the Revolution and at its outbreak in 1789 left France (in 1796 she was living in Saint Petersburg). Vigée Le Brun is shown, palette and mahlstick in hand, pausing from work on an Antique-inspired subject—a votary of Athena, goddess of wisdom and patron of the arts—while a pupil (sometimes identified with Lemoine herself) copies from it. Lemoine was not a pupil of Vigée, and the picture has been interpreted as a eulogy of Vigée Le Brun as a sort of high priestess of painting and a protagonist of female artists.

Open full-size image