The painting Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, painted 1783, is a graceful and delicate portrayal of the famous queen of France. Vigée Le Brun’s skill in portrait painting was unmistakable to anyone who saw her works. At fifteen, according to her memoirs, she was already painting portraits and mingling with great artists. Her talent was so remarkable that she became the most well-known portraitist for Marie Antoinette, painting over thirty portraits of the Queen.
Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress is a stunning portrait. However, the painting of the Queen innocently arranging flowers in a plain white dress caused a large stir in the high art societies of eighteenth-century France, and not in the way Her Majesty or Vigée Le Brun had hoped. In fact, there was such an uproar about the portrait that it had to be removed from the Salon. Additionally, Vigée Le Brun ended up making an updated version of the painting, but I will return to that in a moment.
The reason for the upset surrounding the painting had to do with the “chemise” style dress Marie Antoinette was wearing. There were two things wrong with it. First, was that the dress was made of imported cotton muslin as opposed to French Lyonnaise silk, making it an insult to the country. Second, was that French royalty’s fashion was meant to be exquisitely extravagant at that time. To portray the Queen in something that looked similar to undergarments was scandalous at best.
And so, Vigée Le Brun repainted it. She made a new version with Marie Antoinette standing in a garden holding flowers while wearing an intricate and lacy blue silk gown. This painting, entitled Marie Antoinette with a Rose, was far better received by the courts. 
In my own story, the connection to the first portrait is rather simple. Vigée Le Brun is in the process of painting it as the story begins. In her memoirs, she states, “It may well be imagined that I preferred to paint [Marie Antoinette] in a plain gown and especially without a wide hoopskirt.” I reference this line in the first few paragraphs, as it stuck out to me while I was reading Vigée Le Brun’s memoir. It was a pattern with her, that she preferred to paint women in comfortable clothes with layers of shawls and scarves.
One small detail is that Marie Antoinette wears a bronze, sheer sash tied around her natural waistline in the portrait. In all of Vigée Le Brun’s paintings I could find, I saw that sash appear in one other painting: Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat. If you look closely, it’s the exact same sash. At first, I thought Vigée Le Brun might use the sash in several works, like the yellow mantle in Vermeer’s paintings. However, as I said, the only two I could find were that self-portrait and Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress. A tiny detail, but one I wanted to utilize nonetheless. 