Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), wife of Louis XVI, was the daughter of Maria Theresa, empress of Austria and queen of Hungary and Bohemia. By the late 1770s, Vigée-Lebrun had become her painter of choice, and in this role she produced a number of portraits of her patroness as decorations for the royal palaces or as gifts of state. The present portrait of the twenty-eight-year-old queen is an anonymous, undoubtedly period, copy of a painting executed in the spring of 1783.
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