text: On 31 May 1783, Vigée Le Brun was received as a member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. She was one of only 15 women to be granted full membership in the Académie between 1648 and 1793. Her rival, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, was admitted on the same day. Vigée Le Brun was initially refused on the grounds that her husband was an art dealer, but eventually the Académie was overruled by an order from Louis XVI because Marie Antoinette put considerable pressure on the King on behalf of her portraitist. As her reception piece, Vigée Le Brun submitted an allegorical painting, Peace Bringing Back Abundance (La Paix ramenant l'Abondance), instead of a portrait, even though she was not asked for a reception piece. As a consequence, the Académie did not place her work within a standard category of painting—either history or portraiture. Vigée Le Brun's membership in the Académie was dissolved after the French Revolution because the category of female academicians was abolished.
  Flight from France
  Vigée Le Brun witnessed many of the events that accelerated the already rapid deterioration of the Ancien Régime. While travelling to Romainville to visit the Maréchal de Ségur in July 1788, the artist experienced the massive hailstorm that swept the country, and observed the resultant devastation of crops. As the turmoil of the French Revolution grew, the artist's house on the Rue de-Gros-Chenet was harassed by sans-culottes due to her association with Marie Antoinette. Stricken with an intense anxiety, Vigée Le Brun's health deteriorated. M. and Mme. Brongniart pleaded with her to live with them to convalesce and recover her health, to which she agreed and spent several days in their apartment at Les Invalides. Later in her life, in a letter to the Princess Kourakin, the artist wrote: