The White Hat

In the early 1780s Queen Marie Antoinette began wearing gowns of plain white muslin that needed no stiff structure underneath, and after a first scandal the fashion spread. Greuze dresses this young woman in that loose, undressed style, the gown slipping from one shoulder, under a wide white hat trimmed with feathers. The Museum of Fine Arts doubts she was ever a real sitter. Greuze took many portrait commissions, but this face, innocent and knowing at once, is more likely one he invented. The canvas is an oval, about 57 by 46 centimetres, painted around 1780. It reached New England early. It belonged to Thomas Dowse of Cambridgeport, a tanner and leather dresser who built a celebrated private library and was known as the literary leather dresser. He died in 1856 and left it to the Boston Athenaeum, which sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1975.