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 family, her intense sensory sensitivities that made every apartment unbearable, her bitter rupture with Julie, and her unhappy stints in Napoleonic Paris and London all reveal a woman whose hyper-attuned perception was both her torment and the source of her talent.

• How a tight-fisted stepfather and an exploitative husband, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun, shaped her relentless work ethic
• Why painting the queen in a simple cotton muslin dress was read as an affront to the crown
• The anatomist in Florence who told her that her overwhelming sensitivity was the key to her genius
• A cruel practical joke at the Russian court over bare-armed portraits of Catherine the Great’s granddaughters
• Her final decades of loss, the looting of her country house, and the memoirs she wrote in her eighties with her nieces