Luise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Prussia

In 1801 Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun stopped in Berlin on her way home from Russia, and within three days Queen Luise of Prussia had called her to Potsdam. The queen sat several times while the painter made pastel studies. In her memoirs Vigée Le Brun remembered her at their first meeting in deep mourning, wearing a crown of jet spikes. The oil was finished in Paris in 1802, in a France now run by Napoleon as First Consul. Five years later the sitter would face Napoleon herself. After Prussia's defeat at Jena, Luise went to meet him at Tilsit in July 1807 to plead for milder peace terms, and came away with nothing. The canvas still belongs to her descendants, the Prussian royal house, and hangs at Hohenzollern Castle, the family's hilltop seat in southern Germany.