The painting remained missing for more than 100 years.
The first portrait of Marie Antoinette on French soil, painted by Joseph Siffred Duplessis when the Archduchess of Austria was already married to the heir to the throne of France, has become part of the funds of the Palace of Versailles, which was made with him at auction.
As the institution indicated in a statement on Tuesday, it is a “rare and handwritten” work by one of the most renowned portraitists of the French 18th century.
But also, allows you to discover the young face, with only 16 years, from one of the portraits most represented by the painting of the moment by the brushes of masters such as Joseph Ducreux or François Hubert Drouais.
Marie Antoinette, wife of the heir to the French crown, the future Louis XVI, had just arrived in France when in 1771 Duplessis, nicknamed the “Van Dyck of the French school” was commissioned to produce an equestrian portrait of the aristocrat that the late Louis-Michel Van Loo had not been able to complete.
But due to lack of time to pose, the project was transformed into a simple portrait, which Duplessis prepared with great care, as evidenced by the sketch that is preserved in the Versailles collection.
The painting now acquired by Versailles is unfinished, a sign that Marie Antoinette did not appreciate the way in which the artist represented her and stopped posing for him before his end.
“The bulging eyes, the bulging forehead, the Austrian lip, the typical Austrian chin” were well portrayed by Duplessis’s brush, the statement said, but neither the background nor the details of the dress had time to be finished.
After being part of the collection of the Marquise de Ganay, the painting remained missing for over 100 years and its existence was only known from the sketch kept by Versailles and from a black and white photograph of it.
An expert commissioner found it in the hands of a family from the Essone department, near Paris, under the title “The Marquesita”, But he quickly realized that it was the portrait of the future queen.
Auctioned a few days ago, it was sold for 175,500 euros, four times its starting price, and Versailles used its right of first refusal to enrich its collection of 18th-century portraits, thanks to the contribution of private donors. (I)
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