Императрица Евгения в окружении своих фрейлин

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.