Portrait of Princess Maria Christina

Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun had been Marie Antoinette's favourite portraitist in Paris. When the Revolution broke out in 1789 she fled France almost overnight and spent the next years moving between the courts of Europe. This portrait comes from her stay in Naples around 1790, where she painted the children of King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina, who was herself a sister of that same Marie Antoinette. The small princess sits in a garden in a soft white dress, a basket of roses in her lap, one hand reaching toward a bloom on the bush beside her. Vigee Le Brun worked quickly and flatteringly, and demand for her portraits followed her from court to court through the long years of her exile. Maria Christina, still a child here, would grow up to become Queen of Sardinia.