Marie-Antoinette und ihre Kinder

By 1787 Marie Antoinette was deeply unpopular in France, blamed for the crown's spending and mocked in pamphlets, so Louis XVI commissioned this large portrait to soften her image. Vigée Le Brun, the queen's favourite painter, shows her not as a monarch but as a mother, plainly dressed, her three surviving children gathered around her. The eldest son lifts the cloth on an empty cradle beside her. That cradle had been meant for the baby Sophie, who was born in 1786 and died at 11 months, in the year the picture was painted. Vigée Le Brun left it empty to show the family's grief and win a little public sympathy. It worked poorly. When it was shown at the Salon, the queen's name drew such hostility that there were fears the canvas would be attacked.