The Minneapolis Institute
of Arts has this note about the portrait, "Vigee-Le Brun was a profoundly
gifted painter. At the age of 24, she executed her first portrait of Queen
Marie-Antoinette, and over the course of her career, remained the principal
portraitist of the French aristocracy. On the night that revolutionaries
arrested Louis XVI and his queen in 1789, Vigee -Le Brun went into exile for 12
years. This portrait of Countess Bucquoi was commissioned during a visit to
Vienna in 1793. It ranks as one of the few and most successful examples of the
artist's use of romantic landscape as a background."