Maria Antonietta in abito di corte

1783 was the year Vigee Le Brun got into trouble over a dress. She was admitted to the Royal Academy that spring and sent portraits to the Salon that autumn, one of them showing the queen in a loose white muslin gown of the kind a woman wore in her own garden. Visitors read it as the queen of France in her underclothes, and it was taken down and swapped for a version in which she holds a rose.

This portrait is the other extreme, and it is enormous, close to three metres tall. Marie Antoinette stands in the grand habit the court demanded, white satin, paniers pushing the skirt out at the hips, with the crown of France beside her on a table under crimson velvet. For years the picture was catalogued as the work of the Swedish portraitist Alexandre Roslin before it was returned to her.