Queen Maria Josepha, Wife of King Augustus III of Poland

Maria Josepha, Archduchess of Austria, was born in 1699 in Vienna as the daughter of the subsequent Kaiser Joseph I. In 1719 she married the Saxon Prince Elector Frederick Augustus in Dresden, an occasion for which Frederick Augustus’s father Augustus the Strong staged a series of court festivities of enormous splendour. The marriage was blessed with fifteen children, of whom several died at a tender age. Maria Josepha propagated Catholicism in Protestant Saxony, more specifically the form espoused by the Jesuits (almost all other children were given either Ignatius or Francis Xavier as their patron saint). She died in 1757 in Dresden, a year after the commencement of the Seven Years War.

This portrait shows the Queen at the age of 56. She wears the cross and ribbon of the Russian Order of St Catherine, as well as the Austrian Order of the Starry Cross. Among her exquisite items of jewellery she wears a drop-shaped brilliant in her hair that is held in place by a clip shaped like a black eagle. This famous gem is still preserved in the Green Vault in Dresden to this day. The miniature portrait on her richly adorned bracelet shows her husband. King Augustus III.

The painting conforms to the concept of the eloquent portrait; the sitter directs her gaze at the viewer, and her hand points to the portrait of her husband, the picture’s pendant.