Tea at Trianon: Another Mistaken Portrait

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, October 9, 2025

Another Mistaken Portrait

Illustration of Marie Caroline, sister of Marie Antoinette, in a pink dress, holding a snuffbox.

Maria Carolina of Lorraine-Austria

Illustration of Archduchess Maria Carolina of Austria by Jean-Étienne Liotard.

Maria Antonia of Lorraine-Austria

Portraits of Marie-Antoinette's sisters and nieces have often been mistaken for her. Here is another. From The Times:

A University of Oxford professor has debunked longstanding assumptions about the portrait, believed to depict the “determined look” look of a seven-year old Marie Antoinette — and often cited by critics as indicative of her later stoicism when the French Revolution brought her to the gallows.
Catriona Seth, who herself used the wrong portrait as the cover for a book two decades ago on the last queen of France, said there had always been something that “niggled” her about the 1762 painting by the Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard showing a young girl carrying a shuttle. Seth began investigating about 18 months ago and worked out that the brooch in the painting was actually the chivalric Order of the Starry Cross, which Marie Antoinette would not receive until four years after Liotard painted her and her siblings in Vienna.
Her sister Maria Carolina, who later became the Queen of Naples and Sicily, had received the order in 1762.
“Their mother, Maria Theresa, was a stickler for exactitude and would not have countenanced [Marie Antoinette] wearing an order she was not entitled to,” Seth, a professor at Oxford’s faculty of medieval and modern languages, told The Times. “And there is every reason to think Maria Carolina would be proudly wearing it having just been awarded it.”
Seth then began looking at the portrait in Liotard’s 1762 series of paintings that was supposedly of Maria Carolina and which captured a “demure” young girl. In doing so she discovered that the same pair of earrings in this painting had been worn by Marie Antoinette in a later portrait created in France just as she became queen.
The third clue was the rose carried by the sitter previously assumed to be Maria Carolina. “I have not found any evidence of other people portrayed by Liotard holding roses and, more importantly, most of the iconic portraits of Marie Antoinette as an adult show her holding a rose,” Seth said. (Read more.)