A royal portrait was never only a likeness. It was a message, sent to courtiers, to ambassadors, to a foreign family weighing a marriage. Most of these twelve pictures were made to persuade, and the most revealing hide something: a royal wedding painted without the groom, an emperor shown in the saddle on a day he could not ride.
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How These Were Chosen
A royal portrait had two jobs at once. The face had to be recognizable, and everything around it, the clothes, the pose, the setting, had to say what kind of ruler this was. Painters wanted these commissions, which brought large canvases and the favor of a court.
They also set a hard problem. A real person, sometimes ill, aging, impatient or grieving, had to carry the weight of an office. Each picture here was chosen because the gap between the two still shows, in what the painter chose to hide or to stage.
Several were also made to travel, shipped to another court or repeated in copies for distant palaces. The ranking is mine, counted down from 12 to 1.
12. Attributed to Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Led to Her Execution (1793)
Only a few pen lines were needed for this portrait. Marie Antoinette sits in a cart in a plain white tunic, a bonnet pulled down over hair that was cut short and badly and sticks out in ragged strands.
The sheet is dated 1793, and it is said to show the queen on the morning of October 16, on her way to the scaffold.
That story, and the name of Jacques-Louis David attached to it, rest on a single note. Jean Louis Soulavie, the collector who owned the sheet, wrote underneath that David drew it from a window as the procession passed, in the company of a citizen Jullien, the wife of a deputy, and that the sheet came to him from her.
No other evidence names David, and the note is now doubted. The art historian Philippe Bordes gives the drawing to Dominique Vivant Denon, a zealous supporter of the Revolution, and dates it two months after the execution. If he is right, the sheet is not an eyewitness sketch at all.
Whoever drew it, the ragged hair under the bonnet has neither the polish of a court likeness nor the exaggeration of a caricature.
At a Glance
Artist: Attributed to Jacques-Louis David (1748 to 1825), French
Made: 1793
Medium: Pen and brown ink
Size: 14.8 × 10.1 cm (5.8 × 4 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris (Edmond de Rothschild Collection)
About This Painting
What did Marie Antoinette say on the way to the guillotine?
Her recorded words come from just before the ride. On the morning of October 16, 1793, after the executioner had cut her hair and tied her hands behind her, a priest urged her to be brave. She answered that the moment when her ills were about to end was not the moment when courage would fail her. An open cart then carried her through Paris to what is now the Place de la Concorde.
11. Pierre Paul Prud'hon, The Empress Josephine (1805)
There is no throne in this portrait of an empress, and no crown. Josephine sits alone in a park, in a white dress embroidered with gold and a red cashmere shawl. Pierre Paul Prud'hon began it in 1805, a year after she became empress of the French, then let it wait four years. When he took it up again, her place at court was no longer safe.