Marie Antoinette
by VIGÉE-LEBRUN, Élisabeth, Oil on canvas, 93 x 73 cm
Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), wife of Louis XVI, was the daughter of Maria Theresa, empress of Austria and queen of Hungary and Bohemia. By the late 1770s, Vig�e-Lebrun had become her painter of choice, and in this role she produced a number of portraits of her patroness as decorations for the royal palaces or as gifts of state. The present portrait of the twenty-eight-year-old queen is an anonymous, undoubtedly period, copy of a painting executed in the spring of 1783.