Caroline, Queen of Naples

Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun left Paris in the first week of October 1789, the week the crowd brought the French royal family in from Versailles. She travelled to Rome, and by the spring of 1790 she was working in Naples. The woman she painted there is Maria Carolina of Austria, wife of Ferdinand IV of Naples and the elder sister of Marie Antoinette, whom Vigee Le Brun had painted over and over at the French court. The museum dates this small panel, 37 by 27 centimetres, to around 1790, so the sitter's sister was alive and under guard in Paris while it was being made. The queen is shown at ease on a sofa with a book closed in her hand, a red plume in her hat. The picture stayed in the Spanish royal collection, went to Madrid's museum of modern art in 1896, and came back to the Prado in 1971. At the lower left the old label from those years is still on it.