Portrait of Marie Zéphyrine of France

Marie Zephyrine was born in August 1750, the first child of the dauphin Louis to survive infancy and so a granddaughter of Louis XV. Nattier painted her in 1751, when she was about a year old, seated with a small spaniel, a plain and intimate likeness rather than a mythological allegory. She lived only five years, dying in September 1755, before the brothers who would become Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X were old enough to know her. This small canvas is essentially the only record of her face taken from life. It passed through Parma and the Pitti Palace before the Uffizi acquired it in 1922.