Marie Antoinette in Court Dress

In 1778 the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna wanted a portrait of the daughter she had married off to France, and the commission went to a 23-year-old painter, Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, exactly the queen's own age. It was the first of many times she would paint Marie Antoinette. Here the queen stands almost swallowed by the grand habit de cour, the rigid formal dress the French court still demanded, a boned bodice and wide panniers under swags of white satin, a rose in her hand. The result is stiff, the work of a young artist before her later ease. Maria Theresa was pleased anyway; when it reached Vienna in the spring of 1779 she wrote back that her daughter's large portrait delighted her.