PARIS — “You will be a painter, my child, if ever there was one,” declared the pastel artist Louis Vigée to his precocious young daughter, Louise. That prediction was soon born out, though he did not live to see it.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun became one of the most sought-after and highly paid portrait painters of the age, her long life spanning the second half of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. But her success as a young female painter in a male-dominated profession made her an object of envy and the target of vitriolic, often misogynistic libels in the anti-establishment press during the years leading up to the French Revolution, and her association with the anciens régimes of Europe was a source of lingering prejudice against a remarkable artist and independent woman.

Now, for the first time, Vigée Le Brun is being accorded a magnificent monographic exhibition in her native France, which will continue at the Grand Palais in Paris through Jan. 11, and then travel on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in February and National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in June. She was last the subject of a show in 1982 at the Kimbell Museum of Arts at Fort Worth, Tex., but in the last decades many works have been rediscovered and valuable new research carried out. Elegantly curated by Joseph Baillio and Xavier Salmon, the Grand Palais exhibition contains 160 works, including some very large canvases and exceptional loans from Versailles. Nearly half the pictures are from private collections and many have never been seen in public.

Image Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of Varvara Ivanovna Ladomirskaya (1800). Credit... Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio

The narrative of the exhibition judiciously draws on contemporary documents and on her “Memoirs,” written between 1825 and 1837, which give a vivid and entertaining account of the artist’s life. The show opens with eight of Vigée Le Brun’s self-portraits, among them one she made in Italy in 1790 — for the venerable collection of artists’ self-portraits in the Corridoio Vasariano at the Uffizi in Florence — that has been meticulously cleaned and can at last be fully appreciated. Another, a sketch of herself in her early 20s, only came to light last year in a French salesroom in Deuil-la-Barre. All these pictures, including one executed in her 50s, confirm both her enduring physical allure and accomplishments as an artist.