Dumont's Marie-Antoinette " en costume à l'Antique"

In 2014 I wrote a post on the portraits of Marie-Antoinette by Lorraine artist François Dumont.  Since then several new portraits have appeared at auction including, remarkably, just last month,  this beautiful miniature concealed in a snuffbox, which is said to have been carried by Louis XVI on the flight to Varennes. 

 I thought it  might be an opportune moment to revisit  my earlier essay, particularly with reference to the depiction of the Queen in  antique costume, or "en vestale", of which the new miniature is a significant example.

Marie-Antoinette "on her way to the scaffold"

The sketch by David of Marie-Antoinette "on her way to the scaffold" is an image of enormous resonance and iconic status  - not one to be challenged lightly, even by esteemed members of the French art establishment.  However, the fact that the drawing might not be by David at all but by Vivant Denon has been quietly hinted at for some time by both the  Director of Graphic Arts at the Louvre, Xavier Salmon and by the eminent expert on David, Philippe Bordes.  Salmon first aired doubts in  his 2005 book Marie-Antoinette: images d'un destin (2005); and subsequently, more conspicuously, in the catalogue for the 2008 blockbuster expo Marie-Antoinette at the Grand-Palais in 2008. His observations did not provoke much reaction, though his dissent was noted on the very thorough Wikipedia page devoted to the drawing. 

Is this the face of Marie-Antoinette????

Marie-Antoinette in the Temple prison, by Alexandre Kucharski.
Oil on canvas.  58cm x 68 cm. Described as in a "Parisian collection".

This startling and hitherto completely unknown portrait of Marie-Antoinette is now much reproduced on the internet.  The origin of the images seems to be the book Portraits des femmes (2006) by the Olivier Blanc, who is a well-known French art expert and freelance historical writer - the picture features prominently on the cover of his work.  

According to Blanc (p.171-4) this is an uncatalogued portrait in oil, by the court painter Alexandre Kucharski, painted at the Temple some time after 10 August 1792 and showing Marie-Antoinette in semi-mourning costume following the death of the Princesse de Lamballe.  It is known that Kucharski gained access to the Temple to sketch his famous last portrait of the Queen, so the presumption is that this represents an earlier sitting, worked up into a finished portrait in the studio, possibly at a much later date. Blanc, who has clearly examined the picture, says that the frame gives no clues to dating within ten years; possibly it is as late as the end of the Directory or even the Empire period when Kucharsky's reputation was revived by his portrait of the singer Madame Barbier-Walbonne. The flesh tones and use of white silks in the two paintings perhaps suggest a similar date.

Marie-Antoinette's final portrait

Portrait of Marie-Antoinette
by Alexander Kucharski
Versailles
24 x 18 cm .

Apart from David's famous sketch of the Queen on her way to the scafford,  this portrait, by the former Court painter, Kucharski, is the very last portrait of Marie-Antoinette from life.

Last portraits of Marie-Antoinette - Kucharski

Alexandre Kucharski, Marie-Antoinette, c.1792
Unfinished pastel portrait, 77cm x 60cm
Musée de l'Histoire de France, Versailles

It is to Alexander Kucharski, the second artist of Marie-Antoinette's final years, that we owe this famous and beautiful pastel portrait of the Queen, made the more poignant by its damaged and incomplete state. Intended as a gift for Madame de Tourzel, who pronounced it to be a "perfect likeness", the picture miraculously survived both the aftermath of the flight to Varennes and the Revolutionary assault of 10 August 1792; according to Olivier Blanc, Kucharski himself recouped it and sold it to Madame de Tourzel's son Charles in 1795.  The portrait is now at in the collections at Versailles. Madame de Tourzel wrote the following account on the back of the portrait:

The Queen had this portrait made for the Marquise de Tourzel, Governess of the Children of France: it was almost destroyed at the time of the journey to Varennes and was resumed in 1792.  On tenth August, it was taken from the apartment of Her Majesty and found two years later by the efforts of the marquis de Tourzel Grand prévôt de France.  A precious souvenir of the goodness of the Queen, of whom it gives a perfect likeness, though damaged by all it has suffered.  This portrait of the Queen received on 10th August two pike blows from the Revolutionaries. 

Notice for the 1792 portrait:
"Portrait en buste de la reine Marie-Antoinette" Musée de l'Histoire de France, Versailles
http://www.museehistoiredefrance.fr/index.php?option=com_oeuvre&view=detail&cid=107

Photograph from the Bibl. Nat. collections
Kucharski's portrait on exhibition
at Versailles in 1927

Last portraits of Marie-Antoinette - Dumont

Note of 12/07/2025.  Parts of this post have been significantly revised - see  Rodama: a blog of 18th-century & Revolutionary France: Dumont's Marie-Antoinette " en costume à l'Antique" (rodama1789.blogspot.com)

Versailles.  Miniature 
of Louis XVI
displayed in
the Salon of 1789

Between the years 1780 and 1792 François Dumont established his reputation as the most sought-after French miniaturist. He painted portraits of the Queen from about 1777 onwards and, after a period of study in Rome, in 1786,  became official Court miniaturist following  death of Ignazio Pio Vittoriano Campana.  In 1788 he was received into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and from 1789 exhibited regularly in the Paris Salon. In 1790 the King granted him an atelier-apartment located in the Galleries of Louvre which had become vacant after the death of the engraver Charles Nicolas Cochin.  

 According to Olivier Blanc, Dumont, along with Kucharski, was the artist of Marie-Antoinette's "mauvais jours".   He never hid his royalist sympathies and was imprisoned in the Abbaye prison at the end of 1793, to be  liberated only after the fall of Robespierre. He continued to occupy a place in salons of painting from 1789 to 1824 though his work was overshadowed after the Revolution by that of Isabey and Augustin.

Marie-Antoinette by Joseph Boze

Oil on canvas, about 1785.
73 cm x 57 cm. Signed "Boze"
Private collection

http://www.artnet.com/artists/
joseph-boze/portrait-of-marie-antoinette
-queen-of-france-
iv0Ww8kIw882fkJ_xv-V7Q2

I suspect this portrait of Marie-Antoinette, painted in the mid 1780s by Joseph Boze, is  a good likeness. As reproduced by Olivier Blanc in his book Portrait des femmes (2006) it is beautiful, with subtle skin-tones; I like particularly Marie-Antoinette's slightly watery blue eyes with their hint of light-coloured lashes. There is also little effort to disguise the hooked nose and Hapsburg chin, omitted from many pictures, though more in evidence in sculptured busts of the Queen. Boze was predominantly a pastellist, so working within an informal tradition of portraiture, and had a reputation for realism.

In the early 1780s, several new portraits of the Queen were made in the search for an improved royal image.  Boze, who moved from Nîmes to Paris at this time, was introduced into royal circles possibly through the intermediary of the comte de Tessé, premier écuyer de la reine, and had high hopes of making his career. "I had the good fortune to paint the King and created a striking likeness, which procured me commissions for the royal family and gave me a distinguished reputation", wrote Boze in May 1785.  His account books for 1786-87, which survive, show him hard at work on his royal portraits, creating numerous copies, both in pastel and miniature. His family came to join him in Versailles, where he was lodged in the apartments of the prince de Conti, and he later rented a stylish apartment in the place des Victoires.  The current portrait was billed at 2,400 livres (admitted a relatively modest figure when compared with the 18,000 paid to Vigée Le Brun for her famous portrait of the Queen and her children).

Wertmüller in America

Wertmüller self-portrait
Nationalmuseum Stockholm
c.1795

What was a world there must have seemed between the Court of Versailles and the streets of 18th-century Philadelphia!  Having worked for a while in Bordeaux, Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller fled the Revolution and in May 1794 arrived in the United States, complete with his paintings, among them his mythological masterpiece, Danaë and the Shower of Gold - beautiful, very nude and not at all to Quaker taste.  In following year Wertmüller unveiled to mixed reviews his portrait of George Washington, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  In 1802 he married Elisabeth Henderson, grandaughter of Gustaf Hesselius, the foremost painter of the Swedish colony in Delaware, but his portrait-painting business never entirely flourished and the couple finally bought a farm a few miles downriver from Philadelphia where they spent the last years of their life. A year after his death, the contents of his studio were sold in Philadelphia on May 18, 1812, the earliest recorded catalogued public sale of works of art in America. 

More Wertmüller portraits

Oil portraits of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, signed with initials
 and dated 'A.W./1793.' and 'A:W./1787.' respectively.
Both 16.2 cm x 13.3 cm

Here are a pair of small portraits of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI by Wertmüller which were sold at Christies, New York, in January 1995. This post is really just to marry up the auction notice with images of the two paintings which can be found  - and downloaded in high quality versions  - on the "Corbis" website.  The auction estimate was $50,000-$70,000, but they made only $29,000; not much really considering this was an artist once officially commissioned to paint the French queen!

Wertmuller's Marie Antoinette in hunting costume

After the critical failure of his portrait of Marie-Antoinette and her children, Wertmüller went two years without a major commission and was "plunged into a deep depression". However, in 1788 he created a new portrait depicting the Queen in hunting dress with an unusual Creole style hat.  The image was repainted on a number of occasions, as private gifts.  The sources available on the internet imply that Wertmüller acted on his own initiative, perhaps to redeem his earlier failure.  However, Wertmüller was  close to Madame Campan so the idea could well have originated in Marie-Antoinette's close circle.  The copy which once belonged to Madame Campan's family is described by Lenotre as painted "at the request of the Empress of Austria" - though that doesn't quite tie up as Marie-Theresa died in 1780.  Apparently Wertmüller did not request another sitting from Marie-Antoinette but just used his existing 1785 portrait and studies.

Portrait in Versailles

Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine-Habsbourg, Queen of France, in hunting costume,  1788
Collections of the Château de Versailles.  65cm x 53 cm

This is the iconic image. According to the notice on the Joconde database the portrait is signed and dated: A.Wertmüller. S. / à Paris 1788. However, the picture is something of a mystery.  It was acquired the Château de Versailles only in 1963 and is listed as having been part of the collection of Charles Besnier and that of the marquis d'Argence, sold by public auction in 1963.

Entry on Joconde:  http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/joconde_frACTION=CHERCHER&FIELD_1=REF&VALUE_1=000PE006609

Olivier Blanc has the portrait painted in 1785 and adds that it formerly belonged to the collection of the duchesse d'Angoulême.  Whether the new dating is a simple mistake or a revision based on documentary evidence is not clear.  (There is quite a lot of confusion on the internet where this painting, or copies of it, are often ascribed to Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.)

See:

Olivier Blanc, Portraits des femmes :  artistes et modèles à l'époque de Marie-Antoinette (2006), p.146-48.

It would be nice to have a clearer idea of provenance.  However, the general presumption is that this comparatively large, high-quality portrait is the "original".

Marie-Antoinette by Wertmüller

Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller Queen Marie-Antoinette of France and two of her children walking in the Park of Trianon, 1785.   Height: 2,760 mm (108.66 in). Width: 1,940 mm (76.38 in).Nationalmuseum Stockholm

 This portrait, painted by the Swedish artist Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller in 1785, was generally ill-received by contemporary critics and, to judge by Marie-Antoinette's monstrous headgear, was a bit of a turkey in more ways than one!   If  it was a flop, it was certainly a big one - at 9 feet by 6 feet plus, with lifesize figures, this is a substantial canvas.  Thanks to the Google "Cultural Institute" site you can now visit it in situ  in the Swedish Nationalmuseum -  just click on the little yellow man to be deposited at Marie-Antoinette's feet!
http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/asset-viewer/queen-marie-antoinette-of-france-and-two-of-her-children-walking-in-the-park-of-trianon/AwGGo0NUum8ruw?hl=en

Definitely a disconcerting experience!  There is an almost equally large copy in Versailles, painted in 1868 by Eugène Battaille and once belonging to the Empress Eugenie.