Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, painted twice

You are Élisabeth Louise Vigée, born in Paris in 1755. Your father, Louis Vigée, makes portraits in pastel and lets you use his crayons all day. When you are about eleven, the wife of a painter called Davesne teaches you to mix oil colours.

Joseph Vernet, the marine painter, gives you the advice you say you always followed: follow no school's system, look at the great Italian and Flemish masters, and above all work from nature. “I never had a master, properly speaking,” you write.

Your mother takes you round the Luxembourg Palace and the private collections of Paris. You copy pictures by Rubens, heads by Rembrandt and Van Dyck, and Greuze's girls, for the half-tints of their delicate flesh.

You marry Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a dealer in pictures. By 1782 the orders for portraits come “from every side”, and he has, you say, got into the habit of pocketing your fees. You work fast, sometimes three sittings in a day, and you dislike powder and hooped skirts: you persuade your sitters into loose muslin and draped scarves.

Le Brun's business takes you to Brussels in the summer of 1781, for the sale of the paintings of Prince Charles of Lorraine, held from 19 to 23 June. You meet the Prince de Ligne, see his Van Dycks and Rubens heads, stay at his house at Beloeil, and travel on into Holland, ending in Amsterdam. He has to be back in Paris for a sale on 26 November.

“We returned to Flanders to see the masterpieces of Rubens,” you write. Your memoirs make it one journey, in 1782; Wine shows it was a second one, after Le Brun's last Paris sale of the season on 29 April 1782. The Rubens paintings hang in the Flemish churches, where you think they look far better than they will in Paris; others are in private houses.

In one of those houses in Antwerp, probably that of Jean-Michel-Joseph van Havre, who had married into the Lunden family, you find “the famous Straw Hat”.

The painting is a half-length portrait of a young woman by Rubens, believed in your day to be one of his wives. A broad hat with a feather throws her face into shade; the sun from a clear sky falls on her chest and hands. You put its effect in a sentence: “two different lights”, plain daylight and the glow of the sun.

You did not come to it unprepared. Three guidebooks you could have read, by Descamps, Mensaert and Michel, all describe the face shaded by the hat, lit only by the light around it.

“It delighted and inspired me to such a degree,” you write, “that I made a portrait of myself at Brussels, striving to obtain the same effects. I painted myself with a straw hat on my head, a feather, and a garland of wild flowers, holding my palette in my hand.”

The Rubens is now thought to show Susanna Lunden, and its hat is not straw but beaver felt; the name may come from a slip of paille, straw, for poil, the felt. It was sold to Sir Robert Peel in 1824 and has belonged to the National Gallery since 1871, so both pictures are now in the same collection.

The hat, the feather and the flowers were not what made yours new. They were the fashion of 1782 in its country mode, and you put them on other sitters that year. What was new, Wine argues, was to leave a portrait's face in shadow.

In Brussels you paint the first version on an oak panel, like the Rubens, and set yourself out of doors, like the Rubens, under a sky. It is not an open-air painting: the setting is a fiction, and you would have worked indoors, from a mirror.

You sign and date it on the panel, “L. ze. Le Brun f. / 1782”. It measures 95.5 by 69 centimetres. Back in Paris it is on show by 7 June 1782 at the Salon de la Correspondance, an exhibiting society outside the Académie, where by chance it hangs as a pair with a self-portrait by your rival Adélaïde Labille-Guiard.

By July 1783 it belongs to your friend the comte de Vaudreuil. It later went to England, and it is now in the collection of the baronne Edmond de Rothschild. Wine, who examined it, found it in excellent condition: a recent writer called it a marvel of bravura painting.

That same year you paint the duchesse de Polignac, the queen's friend, in almost the same costume: straw hat, feather, flowers, black shawl, her face partly in shade. Perhaps it was the queen who asked for it, having heard of yours.

The self-portrait helps carry you into the Académie royale. You say that it, with other works, decided Joseph Vernet to propose you, against the opposition of M. Pierre, the king's first painter, who did not want women admitted. In 1783 you are received, and so is Labille-Guiard.

At the Académie's Salon that year the panel hangs again, near Labille-Guiard's self-portrait, and few critics fail to mention it. One reviewer had seen nothing as seductive and harmonious, and thought the shadow of the straw hat on the face utterly true. Baron Grimm called it your masterpiece, and praised the light that made the straw almost transparent.

There were complaints too. The sky was rudimentary, or too blue; the hands were not quite right; a hat that wide and a shawl over the sleeves, one writer objected, would get in the way of painting; and a portraitist, he thought, should not put a face in shadow. Another found the likeness so loose you could hardly be recognised.

Johann Gotthard von Müller drew the composition in 1783, presumably for his engraving published in 1785. You disliked it: the black shadows of an engraving, you said, destroy the whole effect of such a picture.

A replica is not a tracing. Set beside the panel, this canvas differs in ways you chose. The eyebrows are heavier and the eyelids more marked; the lower lip is fuller and the mouth smiles more. The infrared image shows you getting there as you painted: the mouth at first more closed and the eyelids lower, close to the panel, then opened. Wine reads the result as more assertive and self-assured.

The dress is a dusty rose where the panel's is lilac. The black shawl's outline differs a little at the elbow and along the forearm. More of the striped sash hangs from the waist, though that may be because the panel is worn there. And the sky, laid thinly over the pale ground, breaks into cloud.

Your hands changed too. The fingers of the open right hand were altered, and the left hand, holding the palette, was first slightly lower. The panel has a matching change to the right hand.

Nothing is known of this canvas from the time you painted it until 1897, when the dealer S. T. Smith bought it at the posthumous sale of an otherwise unknown A. P. Pickering in Hyde Park and offered it to the National Gallery for £800.

In December one of the Trustees, Alfred de Rothschild, warned the Director, Sir Edward Poynter, that he believed it to be an old copy, and the dealers Colnaghi sent round the version they held, presumably your panel. Poynter compared the two in his room on 11 December. Smith dropped his price to £600, and Poynter bought it.

The doubt stuck. The Gallery's catalogues of 1946 and 1957 called it “after” you, at best a replica of a better version. After the canvas was cleaned and restored in 1984–85, the Director, Sir Michael Levey, restored it to you; in 1987 Joseph Baillio, the specialist in your work, wrote that he was convinced it was a true replica. Wine, in 2018, sees no reason to doubt them, given how often you repeated your own portraits.

It is in good condition. There is a small L-shaped tear near the bottom right corner, a loss about 2 centimetres long in the sky left of centre, a few small losses elsewhere and some flattening of the thickest paint. The cracks in the black shawl, in the hat and in the shadow under the table edge have been retouched. On the back of the stretcher are a label with a blue border numbered 5066 and a chalk mark nobody has explained.