Portrait of Louise, wife of Bonnie Prince Charlie

The sitter had once been all but in line to be a queen. Louise of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, was the by then estranged wife of Charles Edward Stuart, the exiled Jacobite claimant to the British throne known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. By the time Fabre painted her in 1793 that marriage was behind her, and she was living in Florence with the poet Vittorio Alfieri. The year before, the two had fled Paris as the Revolution turned violent. In August 1792 a crowd stopped their carriage at the city gates before they got clear. On the back of this canvas Alfieri wrote a sonnet in her praise, recalling how he had brought her out, in his own words, from cannibals and assassins, exactly two years earlier. In Florence she ran one of the most admired salons of the day. The portrait was made as a pair with Fabre's likeness of Alfieri, and both reached the Uffizi in 1824, the year she died.