The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the correct answer to each question. Things were very different from today when monarchies ruled Europe. Painted portraits were serious affairs — whether of state, commerce, historical record or private life, and whether for royalty, aristocrats and their hangers-on, or the bourgeoisie, who usually could afford only pastel. The career of the French portraitist Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), the subject of a ravishing, overdue survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, unfolded in those earlier times, almost entirely in the courts of Europe. She is best known as a painter of unusually sympathetic portraits of beautiful women of high rank. Only one-sixth of the sitters in these works are male, but their portraits confirm that she was equally effective with men. Vigée Le Brun painted Marie Antoinette numerous times. Made at the request of Marie Antoinette’s mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, it is less than perfect. The queen’s white satin panniers look so hard and shiny they might almost be enameled metal; the background is crowded with competing architectural elements. But the painting pleased Maria Theresa, who was not as interested in a good likeness as proof of her daughter’s regal bearing in court dress. And the treatment of Marie Antoinette’s face captures her dignity, her sweetness and something of the Hapsburg chin. She excelled in more intimate formats, the three-quarter and especially bust-length portraits, where her renderings of expression, lightly powdered ringlets and fabric are beyond reproach. This is confirmed by her 1782 portrait of the Duchess of Polignac in a white chemise and a black wrap, wearing a straw hat decorated with flowers. The image has a casual, almost snapshot-like freshness, and the ruffles at the neckline are as soft as flower petals. Vigée Le Brun was also known for her sensitive depictions of children, best represented here by a 1786 portrait of her beloved daughter, Julie. It shows the 6-year-old holding a mirror and studying her face, and is a kind of double portrait. We see her full-face and in profile, connected to the viewer (and her mother) and aloof. The artist’s portraits are distinctive for their colours, which are unusual, daringly combined and still startling. As suggested by the softened red, yellow and blues that dominate the portrait of the Countess of Ségur, Vigée Le Brun’s colour choices give her paintings an unexpected abstract force that often emboldens their subjects. She could also go for blunt elegance: Paintings using different combinations of red, white and black recur throughout the show, including in three self-portraits.  Question 8.Vigée Le Brun’s portraits discussed in the passage are representative of: miniature artcourt or public art religious art art which uses symbolic motifs