L'impératrice Eugénie entourée de ses dames d'honneur

Franz Xaver Winterhalter painted this in 1855, the year Paris hosted its first great world's fair, and the Empress Eugenie commissioned it to hang in a room of its own at the exhibition. She sits in a forest clearing with eight of her ladies-in-waiting, all in wide silk gowns, gathering flowers, a scene lifted straight from the powdered, 18th-century world of Watteau. That was the point: Napoleon III's new empire wanted to look like the elegant old monarchy it had replaced. Winterhalter won a first-class medal for it, and it made him the most sought-after court portraitist in Europe. The critics were less kind. Theophile Gautier found it too obsessed with elegance, and another writer dismissed the whole thing as a parody of Watteau.