This truly is a find of a life time. A rare 18th-century engraving of Marie Antoinette, after Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun's Marie Antoinette en grand habit de cour, painted in 1778 when the queen was twenty-two and four years on the throne. Vigée Le Brun painted around thirty portraits of her over the next decade and became, in many ways, the keeper of her image; this engraving reproduces the most formal of them, the queen in full court dress, paniers and feathered headdress, posed against a column and a heavy velvet drape. Engravings like this were how the queen's likeness travelled - to provincial châteaux, to foreign courts, to private collectors - long before photography existed to multiply a face. The plate would have been cut by hand, line by line, into copper by a master engraver working from the painting or from a drawing made after it. It survives in its original gilt frame with the egg-and-dart and beaded mouldings of the period, the gilding rubbed in the places where hands have touched it for two hundred years. Sylvie hangs it where it can hold a room on its own, above a console with two candlesticks and nothing else.
Minor variations from the images may occur unless otherwise noted. All sales are final.
