La reine si petite - portrait miniatures of Marie Antoinette

François Dumont.

Putting together a collection of portraits of Marie Antoinette is always a tricky business. Besides the easy pitfall of known images copied by different hands at a later date, combined with the general lack of concern for getting an accurate likeness at the time, you also have to be able to sift through all the portraits that are labeled as Marie Antoinette that probably/certainly aren't; a painting of the martyred Queen is always going to have more allure, have a higher auction value, than one that is merely of some pretty inconnue.

Most of the portraits here are by the hand of the Queen's favorite miniature painter, François Dumont (7 January 1751, Lunéville – 27 August 1831, Paris). His work for her, starting in the 1770s and continuing until only a year before her execution, is usually easy enough to identify. In addition to his particular technique, the position of the head is almost always the same in portrait after portrait; it's therefore likely that the Queen didn't sit for every one, rather that he reused the preferred likeness, only changing the surrounding elements - hairstyle, clothing, background. I haven't always been able to identify which of his pieces here are autograph; I assume that some of these are contemporary copies. And I don't know the dates for most of these, though the decade in which they were produced is not too difficult to surmise given the hairstyles: up for the 1770s, across for the 1780s.

François Dumont.

Jean-Laurent Mosnier, 1775.

François Dumont.

Jean-Baptiste Isabey. Isabey was student of Dumont at the time, and his extreme youth would account for the crude technique and poor likeness.

François Dumont. Possibly a copy.

François Dumont.

Pierre-François Drais, Paris, 1777. I'm not entirely convinced that this is Marie Antoinette.

Pierre Adolphe-Hall.

Pierre Adolphe-Hall. Possibly a copy with variations.

Vincenza Benzi-Bastéris, 1784.

François Dumont.

Ignazio-Pio-Vittoriano (Ignace-Jean-Victor) Campana, circa 1783. Sent to the Queen's paramour, Count Axel Ferson.

Ignazio-Pio-Vittoriano (Ignace-Jean-Victor) Campana, circa 1783. Sent to the Queen's sister, Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples.

 Louis-Marie Sicard, called Sicardi, 1787.

Louis-Marie Sicard, called Sicardi.

Unknown, possibly Dumont.

François Dumont.

François Dumont.

François Dumont. Possibly a copy.

François Dumont. Probably a copy.

Marie Antoinette et ses enfants (Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte et le Dauphin Louis-Charles) au pied d'un arbre, by François Dumont, 1790.

Portrait of the King, Queen, and the duc de Normandie in the style of Louis-Bertin Parant, circa 1790.

François Dumont. Several of her portraits from this last period are "antique" in style.

François Dumont.

François Dumont.

Unknown. This appears to be a mourning ring so, possibly, it was made after the Queen's death.

François Dumont, 1792.

François Dumont, 1792.

The chevalier François de Ginestous, circa 1793, the year of her death.

François Dumont.

*

Sometimes the internet lets me down! I've seen this particularly lovely early portrait of the Queen by Dumont reproduced numerous times. And yet when I looked - and looked... and looked - to find an image of it to include here, I could not find one. Only this black and white image; a cropped version with the color gone awry; and some sort of copy of the original, perhaps a colored engraving. Very disappointing....

And while I was at it, another early Dumont portrait turned up - but this was all I could get of it. Argh.

Drop-front desk (secrétaire à abattant, or secrétaire en cabinet) - attributed to Adam Weisweiler, circa 1787

Secrétaire à abattant, or secrétaire en cabinet: oak veneered with thuya burl, amaranth, mahogany, satinwood, holly, and ebonized holly; painted metal; one Sèvres plaque; fifteen Wedgwood medallions; bronze doré mounts; marble; leather (not original).

Loosely adapted from the essay on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website:

The interlaced stretchers and bulbous, downward-tapering legs of this graceful secretary are characteristic of the work of Adam Weisweiler; moreover, the bronze doré female half-figures used as corner mounts appear on other pieces by this cabinetmaker. Edmé-François Bouillat the Elder, one of the most talented flower painters at Sèvres, was responsible for the ribbon-tied bouquet on the central plaque. (According to a label pasted on the back, the price was 336 livres, and we know that the marchand-mercier Daguerre purchased a plaque for that amount in 1782.) The pointillé (stippled) borders are attributed to Madame Vincent Tallandier who, with her husband, specialized in this kind of decoration. Framed in bronze doré garlands, fifteen Wedgwood jasperware cameos decorate the front and sides of the desk. Some show classical scenes based on antique gems, while others depict mothers and children engaged in domestic pursuits. They formed part of a so-called Domestic Employment series first advertised in a Wedgwood catalogue of 1787, which suggests a date for the secretary, as does the fact that in the same year Daguerre signed an agreement with Josiah Wedgwood to sell his wares in Paris.

Following the attack on the palace of Versailles on 5-6 October 1789, the French royal family was forced to remove themselves to the Château des Tuileries in Paris, where they spent the next three years under house arrest. A few days after their arrival, the queen consigned to the marchand-mercier Dominique Daguerre and his partner, Martin-Eloi Lignereux, a number of her most treasured possessions for safekeeping. Among those objects was a porcelain-mounted secretary, which may, in fact, have been this one and which was possibly the last piece of furniture Daguerre had delivered to Marie-Antoinette for her rooms at Versailles.

Even so, in 1794, after the executions of both the king and queen, when an inventory of the seized royal furniture warehoused at Versailles was drawn up by the new régime, among the pieces listed was a secretary, its drop front mounted with a large Sèvres plaque and ten medallions forming garlands—a description that appears to fit the present piece. During the early part of the nineteenth century it entered the collection of Charles Mills, a London banker and art collector with a taste for Sèvres porcelain and furniture mounted with Sèvres plaques. And it remained with his descendants until the 1930s, when it was sold to the well-known art dealer Joseph Duveen, and eventually made its way into the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

My heroines - six decades of inspiration, fascination, and affection

*

My maternal grandmother, Elizabeth. (Two images.)

My mother, Mary. (Two images.)

*

And the one: my wife, Gigi.