Selected excerpts from the memoirs of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, the renowned French portraitist of the 18th century and one of the most important female painters in art history. In her memoirs, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun offers an honest and delightful narrative of her life and art. She describes her encounters with the royal family and the aristocracy she painted—including her most famous patron, Marie Antoinette—and the warm reception she received throughout Europe. Escaping during the French Revolution, Vigée Le Brun traveled through Italy, Russia, Germany, and England, returning twelve years later to France under Napoleon I. These pages demonstrate her continuous creativity during unstable times and her remarkable insight. Her observations provide unique insights into the world of 18th and 19th-century art, an era in which few women managed to succeed. In the introduction to this volume, academic Anne Tighon shares Vigée Le Brun's unique position at a pivotal moment in art, as well as the broader world around her, and explores in particular how one reconstructs retrospectively a relationship with a revolutionary change in the world.