Marie-Antoinette - Portrait by Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun

Reference : FR038

POSTCARD AVAILABLE FOR TRADE
Size : 10 x 15 cm

"Marie-Antoinette à la rose par Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun".

Marie Antoinette (2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was an Archduchess of Austria and the Queen of France and Navarre. She was the fifteenth and penultimate child of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Emperor Francis I.

At the age of fourteen, on the day of her marriage to Louis-Auguste, Dauphin of France, she became Dauphine de France. At the death of King Louis XV, in May 1774, her husband ascended the French throne as Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette assumed the title of Queen of France and Navarre. After seven years of marriage she gave birth to a daughter, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, the first of their four children.

Initially charmed by her personality and beauty, the French people generally came to dislike her, accusing "the Austrian" of being profligate and promiscuous and harboring sympathies for France's enemies.

During the Reign of Terror, at the height of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette's husband was deposed and the royal family was imprisoned. She kept in contact with Austria, France's enemy at the time, and took decisions for her weak and hesitant husband. She was tried, convicted of treason and executed by guillotine on 16 October 1793, nine months after her husband.

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Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun (16 April 1755 – 30 March 1842) was a French painter, and is recognized as the most famous woman painter of the eighteenth century. Her style is generally considered Rococo and shows interest in the subject of neoclassical painting. Vigée-Le Brun cannot be considered a purely Neoclassist, however, in that she creates mostly portraits in Neoclassical dress rather than the History painting. In her choice of color and style while serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette, Vigée-Le Brun is purely Rococo.