Abstract

My analysis of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s Portrait of Marie-Josèphe of Saxony and Her Son (1761) in the context of Salic Law and eighteenth-century French gender politics suggests the future queen’s negotiation of her own identity in royal portraiture. While the dauphine’s representation adheres to rigidly structured codes of queenship in French art, I argue that Marie-Josèphe paradoxically sought to assert her selfhood amidst the depicted glory of the Bourbon dynasty. Likely to be the portrait’s direct patron instead of the King’s Household, Marie-Josèphe adopted sartorial and ideological elements from Jean-Marc Nattier’s more private portrayal of Queen Marie Leszczinska (1748) to construct her image, suggesting a visual fellowship between royal women as they confronted gender constraints within French absolutism in art. Also, unlike most official portraits that formally represented royal sitters in oils, La Tour’s more personal approach to painting through the intimacy of the pastel medium undermines the principles of royal portraiture to indicate a degree of the dauphine’s agency. With imagery that falls in-between what was typical for official and private portraits of royalty, La Tour’s pastel painting alludes to mounting ambiguities in representations of queenship in eighteenth-century France.

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