“Only in painting have I found happiness,” Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun confided at the end of her long, prolific career. Though Vigée Le Brun’s high society portraits earned her great fame during her lifetime, her sentimental style fell out of fashion and she largely dropped off the radar. Her long overdue retrospective, “Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (February 15 to May 15, 2016). Organized at the Met by Katharine Baetjer, curator in the department of European paintings, the exhibition follows Vigée Le Brun’s singular career chronologically -- from Paris to her peripatetic years as an émigré artist and return to France. According to Baetjer, preparation for the exhibition confirmed Vigée Le Brun’s technical skills. “Her works on both canvas and panel are exceptionally well preserved and, as far as one can know, seem to look much as they did when they were painted.” We first meet the artist in a terracotta Read More