[Mike McCarty]

From her father she inherited a talent and taste for art, an amiable temper, a gift of wit; from her mother, a very handsome woman, she was dowered with a beauty for which she was as remarkable, and to which her many portraits of herself bear abundant witness. From very childhood she began to display the proofs of her inheritance - that happy disposition and that charm of manner that were to make her one of the most winsome personalities of her time. At her tenth year she fell to drawing on the margins of her books, filling them with little portrait heads - an incessant habit that set her teachers grumbling at her lack of respect towards grammar and history. But to her delighted father the grumbles were matter for laughter; in him she found an ally who was hugely proud to discover in his girl an inheritor of his gifts. It is told of the fond father that the girl having taken to him one day a drawing, Vigee cried out exultantly: "You will be a painter, my girl, or there never was one!"

The above was excerpted from the biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun 1755-1842. I would highly recommend this short biography which can be read in it