The Belvedere at the Petit Trianon, Versailles

Between 1788 and 1781, to the designs of her personal architect, Richard Mique, a music salon was built for Marie Antoinette on a small artificial hill at Trianon, part of the new "English" garden on the estate. Called the Belvédère du Petit Trianon, or the Pavillon du rocher - after the adjacent artificial rock formation, waterfall, and grotto - it is a small octagonal stone "folly" in the neoclassical style. The four overdoors - incorporating attributes of gardening and hunting - and the carvings above the four windows - representing the Seasons - as well as the eight sphinxes flanking the pavilion are the work of the sculptor Joseph Deschamps, assisted by the young Pierre Cartellier. The interior is richly decorated with arabesques painted in oil on stucco by Sébastien François Leriche, while the ceiling painting was created by Jean-Jacques Lagrenée le Jeune, and the floor is a beautiful mosaic of white, red, green, and bleu turquin marble. In fine weather, the pavilion was furnished with eight armchairs - fauteuils en bergère - and eight chairs - chaises à dossier - the work of François II Foliot, and based on the models of architect Jacques Gondouin. (Delivered in 1781, the costly chairs were sold off during the Revolution; just one has been returned to Versailles.) After a year of meticulous restoration, the renewed and preserved Belvedere was inaugurated in June of 2012.

An anonymous watercolor made soon after the construction of the Belvedere.

One of the original chairs. The original upholstery was of painted blue and white silk, luxuriously trimmed.

Apparently, the embroidered fabric on this chair - not the one at Versailles - was modeled after the design of the original.

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Most of the images in this post were adapted from those on the Andrewhopkinsart blogspot, whose own post on the subject tells the story of the Belvedere expertly!

The duc de Richelieu, by Jean-Marc Nattier, circa 1732

Behind the duc are arrayed the robes and accoutrements of the Order of the Saint-Esprit, the senior chivalric order of royal France.

Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (13 March 1696, Paris – 8 August 1788, Paris), French soldier and diplomat, he participated in three major wars, eventually rising to the rank of Marshal of France, and was for a time French ambassador to the Imperial court in Vienna. A godson of Louis XIV, he was a close friend of Louis XV. His favor at court waned when he opposed the marquise de Pompadour, and was restored at her death and the rise of du Barry. But his intriguing nature and very unsavory reputation made him far from welcome at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. For he is best known, then and now, for his rampant, indiscreet womanizing. Married three times - his final marriage was consecrated when he was eighty-four - and his extramarital conquests were reckless and innumerable; it is said that the famous character Valmont in Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses was based on the duc de Richelieu. Despite years spent in battle and in amatory excess, he managed to survive to the extraordinary age - especially for the time - of ninety-two.

A copy after Nattier, circa 1732-42.

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Jean-Marc Nattier (17 March 1685, Paris – 7 November 1766, Paris), French painter, certainly the most important court portraitist of the eighteenth century. The child of two artists, he enrolled in the Royal Academy in 1703, with aspirations of becoming a history painter. But he found portraiture to be much more lucrative, and was successful in his chosen career from an early age. He painted numerous portraits of the French Royal family - especially the daughters of Louis XV - and the aristocracy gathered at Versailles. His style is immediately recognizable. Cool, muted. And with a particular kind of calm, even when portraying the floating, fluttering drapery of his female subjects, got up as nymphs and goddesses, one of his most characteristic devices.

The Empress Maria Theresia, by Jean-Étienne Liotard, 1747

Maria Theresia Walburga Amalia Christina (13 May 1717, Vienna 29 November 1780, Vienna), the only female ruler of the Habsburg empire, she was the sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Mantua, Milan, Lodomeria and Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands, and Parma. By marriage, she was Duchess of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and Holy Roman Empress.

Unlike most of his best known work, this portrait is painted in enamel on copper.

Her 40-year reign began at the death of her father, Emperor Charles VI, in 1740. Charles VI had paved the way for her accession with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 and spent his entire reign securing it. (Upon his death, Saxony, Prussia, Bavaria, and France all repudiated the sanction they had recognized during his lifetime, and Prussia proceeded to invade the affluent Habsburg province of Silesia, sparking a nine-year conflict known as the War of the Austrian Succession.) Though she had been expected to cede power to her husband Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, and, later, to her eldest son Joseph, both of whom were officially her co-rulers in Austria and Bohemia, Maria Theresia was the absolute sovereign who ruled with the counsel of her advisers. She instituted financial and educational reforms, spurred business and agricultural development, and reorganized the military, all of which greatly strengthened Austria's international standing. The Empress also understood the importance of her public persona and was able to simultaneously evoke both esteem and affection from her subjects.

She and her husband had sixteen children. Among the thirteen who survived infancy were Queen Marie Antoinette of France, Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, Duchess Maria Amalia of Parma, and two Holy Roman Emperors, Joseph II and Leopold II; the marriages of her all children would be carefully calculated to ensure the most political gain for Austria. Though her own marriage had also been an arranged one, the Empress was very much in love with her husband and was devastated at his death in 1765; for the remaining fifteen years of her life she wore mourning and completely withdrew from court and public life. Her health was severely compromised by an attack of smallpox in 1767, but she remained resolutely in command until her death at the age of sixty-three.

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Jean-Étienne Liotard (22 December 1702, Geneva – 12 June 1789, Geneva), Swiss-French artist of great versatility, though his fame depends largely on his cool and sharp-focused pastel drawings; after Maurice Quentin de La Tour, he is probably the greatest of the great eighteenth-century French pastelists. After studying with masters in his home town of Geneva, he went to Paris in 1725 and, later, he was resident in Naples, Rome, and Constantinople. His time spent in the latter proved to be very influential on his art -- and on his personal appearance; he painted many genre scenes and portraits in which the European subjects are dressed in a version of Turkish attire, and his own very eccentric adoption of Oriental dress and a long beard earned him the nickname le peintre turc, the Turkish painter. He went on to work in Vienna, London, and the Netherlands, before returning to Geneva in 1776. He devoted his last years to writing a treatise on painting, and working at still lifes and landscapes. He died at the age of eighty-six.

The duchesse d'Angoulême, by Alexandre-François Caminade, 1827.

It is evident from damage to the bottom and sides and, especially, the top, that the painting was at some point placed in a much smaller frame.

Marie Thérèse Charlotte of France (19 December 1778, chateau de Versailles – 19 October 1851, Frohsdorf, Austria), eldest child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, later duchesse d'Angoulême. She was the only one of her immediate family to survive the Revolution. After several years in prison - after the executions of both her parents, her beloved aunt Élisabeth, and the death by neglect of her younger brother, Louis-Charles - on 18 December 1795, the day before her seventeenth birthday, she was exchanged for a political prisoner being held in Austria, and sent to her mother's family in Vienna.  She was unhappy there - she knew no one - and later joined her uncle, the future Louis XVIII, in exile in Courland. Since he had no heir, himself, he convinced her to marry her first cousin, the duc d'Angoulême, son of her other surviving uncle, the future Charles X. The duc was a shy, backward young man, and the marriage, arranged for purely dynastic reasons, proved childless.

A detail of the unrestored painting.  I may be projecting, but her eyes seem incredibly sad....

The royal family moved to England for several years, and at the fall of Napoléon in 1814, they returned to France where the monarchy was restored. Their triumph was short-lived. The following year Napoléon escaped his exile in Elba and began raising an army in the period that would later be known as the One Hundred Days, and Louis XVIII was forced to flee the country. But the duchesse d'Angoulême, who was in Bordeaux at the time, rallied the local troops. They agreed to defend her, and she refused to leave Bordeaux even after Napoléon ordered her arrest. Finally, believing her cause lost, and wanting to avoid senseless bloodshed, she agreed to leave France. Her personal bravery caused Napoléon to famously declare that she was the "only man in her family."

Like with most important royal commissions, reductions and variants of the painting were produced.

After Waterloo and Napoléon's final defeat, Louis XVIII once again returned as king of France. Since neither of her uncles' wives were still living, the duchesse d'Angoulême was considered the first lady of the Bourbon Restoration, and during the reign of Charles X, as her husband was the heir to the throne, she was addressed as Madame la Dauphine. The return to France had been very traumatic for her.  After her experiences during the Revolution, she probably suffered from what we would now label PTSD.  Still, she managed to fulfill all her royal duties with a very dignified and rigidly correct manner, though she was compared unfavorably to her famously graceful and charming mother; the fickle French somehow failed to notice the cruel irony of their criticisms.

The policies of Charles X were increasing unpopular, and in 1830, after the three day "July Revolution", what remained of the royal family once again went into exile, first to Edinburgh, then to Prague. In 1844, after the deaths of her uncle and husband, she went to live at Schloss Frohsdorf, a castle just outside of Vienna. The son and daughter of her husband's late brother - with whom she was very close, and who were the last of the legitimate royal line - came to live with her. She died a few years later, at the age of seventy-two.

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Alexandre-François Caminade (14 December 1783, Paris – 27 May 1862, Paris), French painter, known for his portraits and religious subjects.  He was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1833.

Anne Vallayer-Coster

Anne Vallayer-Coster (21 December 1744, Paris – 28 February 1818, Paris), French artist specializing in floral paintings and still lifes. Having displayed great talent at an early age, she was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1770, at the age of twenty-six, only one of four women accepted into the Académie prior to the French Revolution.

Anne Vallayer-Coster, by Alexander Roslin, 1784.

In the academic hierarchy, the still life was considered one of the lesser art forms, but Vallayer-Coster's skill was so great that she attracted the interest of collectors and the great respect of other artists. She also appears to have been quite adept at politics, and showed great skill in negotiating the inherent difficulties of being a woman in the Arts. In 1775, she began to show the paintings of flowers for which she is best known, and came under the patronage of Marie Antoinette four years later. Other royal patronage followed. In 1781, with pressure from the queen, Vallayer-Coster was allowed space to live and work in the Louvre, a situation extremely unusual for a woman at the time. Soon after - at Versailles, in the presence of the queen - she made an advantageous marriage, ascending to the lower ranks of the nobility.

During the Revolution, because of her royal connections and noble status, her situation became quite difficult, personally, and though she weathered the Terror, her career never recovered.

Le Petit Théâtre de la Reine, and a brief miscarriage of color

The Petit Théâtre de la Reine, which is situated adjacent to the Jardin Français of the Petit Trianon, was designed by Marie Antoinette's achitect, Richard Mique, and constructed in 1780.  The building is quite austere on the exterior, but the interior - which only seats, at maximum, one hundred - was lavishly decorated in the height of the current, delicately neo-classical style.  The décor, giving the appearance of being constructed of marble and gilt bronze, is actually all made of wood and papier maché.  Remarkably, this beautiful and fragile structure has survived intact; most remarkably, so has its extensive stage machinery.

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For a time, during the reign of Louis Philippe (1830-1848), the blue wall hangings and drapery were changed from the original greenish-blue to a vivid red.  An unfortunate choice which was later, thankfully, undone.

Vue du petit théâtre de Marie-Antoinette au Petit Trianon sous Louis-Philippe, by Antoinette Asselineau, 1838.