Happy Easter!
This is Marie-Adelaïde of France dressed in the Turkish style, painted by Jean-Étienne Liotard in 1753. It’s in the Uffizi in Florence.
I love this painting. It’s so intimate, and she is so self-contained. She isn’t showing any skin. She isn’t gazing out looking alluring, eager to have her beauty immortalised, or to snare a suitor. She is beautifully dressed (anything Turkish was the height of fashion) but nothing about the painting amplifies her status as a princess of France1. She is doing entirely her own thing, in her own space, engrossed in her book, feet tucked up on the sofa. It’s an astonishingly modern image.
I also love how much it owes to Dutch painting from the 1700s and its richly satisfying depictions of domestic interiors. Speaking of which, note the 18th century example of unexpected red theory in the window frame!
Marie-Adelaïde was one of the daughters of Louis XV. She later escaped from Versailles on the eve of the Revolution - just. She and her sister Victoire eventually made it to Rome - again, just - and then to Naples, and finally Trieste. She and Victoire maintained a Versailles-style retinue of 80 people, to the consternation of their Italian hosts, who had to accommodate them all. She never married and died aged 67. Her body was returned to France at the time of the Bourbon restoration and is buried in Paris.
But all that unimaginable future lies ahead, and for now she’s just a girl reading.
It's one of those images so alive that there is a pang in reflecting that she's dead.
Happy Easter! Oh yes the Liotard and the Lavergne family breakfast is marvellous. Unmissable. What a frisson to see the oil and the pastel next to each other for the first time after 250 years. Such a human moment captured: the milky coffee overflowing and the little girl with her curlers, the messy table. I’ve no idea how a pastels could have been fixed to last yet it’s aged better than the later oil. Thanks so much for this beauty and the back story.