A self-portrait with a slightly open, smiling mouth was enough to spark a national scandal in late 18th-century Paris. The woman behind it, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, became one of the most successful portrait painters of her era, the official painter to Marie Antoinette, and a member of the Académie Royale after the king overruled its objections. This episode draws on her memoirs and biographical sources to follow her from a childhood marked by her father's early death and a cruel stepfather to the royal court, and then through exile across Europe after 1789.

We cover the muslin dress scandal of 1783, the calculated 1787 portrait of the queen with her children and an empty cradle, and her midnight escape from Paris in shabby clothes with her nine-year-old daughter Julie. Her six years in St. Petersburg painting Catherine the Great's f ...