"A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth." -- John Singer Sargent

Friday, January 31, 2020

Marie-Antoinette



This  post-1783 portrait of Marie-Antoinette by an unknown artist after Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun's 1783 Marie Antoinette en chemise hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The original portrait by Le Brun garnered some controversy by showing the Queen in such informal dress. The Metropolitan Museum of art which owns the original say this:
With the support of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, Vigée Le Brun became one of fourteen women (among 550 artists) admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture before the Revolution. At her first Salon, she displayed a number of portraits, including one of the queen in a white muslin dress and straw hat. The characterization of the monarch was admired. However, the pastoral costume was condemned as inappropriate for the public portrayal of royalty and the artist was asked to remove it from the exhibition. -- The Met
The portrati was not only controversial because it depicted the queen in clothing that resembled an undergarment, It was deemed unpatriotic because the dress was made of cotton a product of the English empire not French silk. Caroline London at Racked claims that by making cotton dresses fashionable Marie Antonette encouraged the rise of slavery by increasing the demand for cotton. See: The Marie Antoinette Dress That Ignited the Slave Trade by Caroline London in Racked, Jan 10, 2018. For a discussion of the politics of this dress see: Impropriety, Informality and Intimacy in Vigée Le Brun’s Marie Antoinette en Chemise by Kelly Hall, pp. 21–28. Providence College Art Journal, 2014.

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