Portrait de Mathilde de Canisy, marquise d'Antin

The girl in this portrait was already a marquise. Mathilde de Canisy had been married at 12 to the marquis d'Antin, the way great families arranged their children in the France of Louis XV, and Nattier painted her at about 14, in 1738. He gives her the full apparatus of an aristocratic beauty, a flowing gown, a garland of flowers, a bright parrot on one hand and a little dog under the other, posed against an open landscape. It drew almost no attention when he showed it at the Salon that year, ten years before he became the favoured portraitist of the king's daughters. It is now one of the most loved things in the Jacquemart-Andre collection in Paris.