Mme. Le Brun’s works numbered six hundred and sixty portraits—­fifteen genre or figure pictures and about two hundred landscapes painted from sketches made on her journeys.  Her portraits included those of the sovereigns and royal families of all Europe, as well as the most famous authors, artists, singers, and the learned men in Church and State.

As an artist M. Charles Blanc thus esteems her:  “In short, Mme. Le Brun belonged entirely to the eighteenth century—­I wish to say to that period of our time which rested itself suddenly at David.  While she followed the counsels of Vernet, her pencil had a certain suppleness, and her brush a force; but she too often attempted to imitate Greuze in her later works and she weakened the resemblance to her subjects by abusing the regard noye (cloudy or indistinct effect).  She was too early in vogue to make all the necessary studies, and she too often contented herself with an ingenuity a little too manifest.  Without judging her as complacently as the Academy formerly judged her, we owe her an honorable place, because in spite of revolutions and reforms she continued to her last day the light, spiritual, and French Art of Watteau, Nattier, and Fragonard.”

VIGRI, CATERINA DE. Lippo Dalmasii was much admired by Malvasia, who not only extols his pictures, but his spirit as well, and represents him as following his art as a religion, beginning and ending his daily work with prayer.  Lippo is believed to have been the master of Caterina de Vigri, and the story of her life is in harmony with the influence of such a teacher.

She is the only woman artist who has been canonized; and in the Convent of the Corpus Domini, in Bologna, which she founded, she is known as “La Santa,” and as a special patron of the Fine Arts.

Caterina was of a noble family of Ferrara, where she was born in 1413.  She died when fifty years old; and so great was the reverence for her memory that her remains were preserved, and may still be seen in a chapel of her convent.  There are few places in that ever wonderful Italy of such peculiar interest as this chapel, where sits, clothed in a silken robe, with a crown of gold on the head, the incorrupt body of a woman who died four hundred and forty years ago.  The body is quite black, while the nails are still pink.  She holds a book and a sceptre.  Around her, in the well-lighted chapel, are several memorials of her life:  the viola on which she played, and a manuscript in her exquisite chirography, also a service book illuminated by Caterina, and, still more important, one of her pictures, a “Madonna and Child,” inserted in the wall on the left of the chapel, which is admirable for the beauty of expression in the face of the Holy Mother.

We cannot trace Caterina’s artist life step by step, but she doubtless worked with the same spirit of consecration and prayer as did that Beato whom we call Angelico, in his Florentine convent, a century earlier.