Martin van Meytens

When you picture Empress Maria Theresa, ruler of the Habsburg lands, you are probably picturing Martin van Meytens. As her principal court painter from the 1740s, he fixed the official look of her reign: the full skirts, the crown jewels, the calm authority, copied out again and again for palaces and embassies across the empire.

Meytens had come a long way to that job. Born in Stockholm to a Dutch painting family, he started as a maker of tiny enamel portraits and worked his way through London, Paris and Italy before settling in Vienna around 1730. In 1759 he was made director of the Academy of Fine Arts there.

His workshop turned out enormous dynastic pictures, the whole imperial family arranged like a living genealogy, including a young Marie Antoinette among the many children. These were instruments of rule as much as portraits, a way of showing the dynasty's size and continuity to anyone who entered the room. The vast group portrait of Maria Theresa, her husband Francis, and their brood still hangs in Schönbrunn Palace, the summer residence outside Vienna. Meytens died in Vienna in 1770, at 74, after nearly three decades as the court's leading portraitist.