Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, Duchess of Maine

Nicolas de Largillière was the portrait painter that Parisian high society went to under Louis XIV, and in 1695 he painted this young woman, Anne-Louise-Benedicte de Bourbon-Conde. She was a princess of the blood, small in stature and famously sharp-tempered, and a few years earlier she had been married off to one of the king's sons born outside marriage, the Duke of Maine. That match bound two branches of the royal family together whether she liked it or not. When Largilliere painted her she was still in her teens, years before the lively little court she would later keep at the chateau of Sceaux, with its all-night parties and its poets. He hands her the heavy silks and steady gaze a Bourbon expected from a state portrait. Largilliere would go on painting wealthy Paris this way for another forty years, outliving the king, her husband, and the world of Versailles this picture belongs to.