MASP

Of the ten children of the marriage between Marie Leszczynska and Louis XV, in 1725 Louise-Elisabeth, was the first-born of the seven surviving and therefore the Infanta. After her, in order, came Anne-Henriette, Marie-Adélaïde, Victoire-Louise, Sophie-Philippine, Louise-Marie, and the only son, Louis, who died before Louis XV and was the father of Louis XVI. It should be noted that Nattier also left an extraordinary portrait, now hanging in Versailles, of Louise-Marie (1737-1787) the youngest of the six sisters and better known by her religious name, the venerable Thérèse de Saint-Augustin, the leading Carmelite and visceral enemy of Marie-Antoinette. The only one to marry was Louise-Elisabeth, who when portrayed in 1750, had become Duchess of Parma through her marriage in 1748 to Don Filipe de Bourbon (1720-1765), the second son of Philip V, King of Spain, recognized by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) as Duke of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. Louise-Elisabeth, who died in 1759, was only 20 years old when she posed for her portrait as Earth. Her attributes as Cybele – with the inevitable terrestrial globe, her breast uncovered, as if suggesting the bosom of the mother-goddess and the fruits over-flowing from the horn of plenty – are also those of tilling the earth, showing a peasant in a field and typical village in the distance, possibly alluding to the recently acquired title of Duchess of Parma. It is plausible that the contrast between wild vegetation to the left and the city with its cultivated fields on the right suggests the culture/nature dichotomy in its 18th-century meaning, as suggested by Aguilar (1991, p.31), although it would seem more likely that this polarity is taken up in the symbolism of Cybele herself, goddess of the creations of nature and protector of cities. Hence the verse which in 1757 accompanied Bachélou’s engraving: “C’est du Soleil que je reçoy / Une vertu toujours active / Il n’est point de saison où je demeure oisive / Le bonheur des humains est ma supreme Loy”.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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Louise-Henriette de Bourbon-Conti, Duchess of Orléans, as Hebe, the Godoodess is a copy of the original painting conserved at the Stockholm Museum (Inv. 1186), probably shown at the Paris Salon of 1743, the year the model was married (rather than 1745, as published in Christie’s catalogue for the 1949 auction at which the Masp painting was bought). This genre of female portraiture featuring attributes borrowed from deities such as Hebe, the goddess of youth, who appears here with Jupiter’s eagle, is recurrent in Nattier’s work. The painter revived this genre in the portrait Madame la Duchesse de Chartres, shown at the 1745 Salon; in Portrait of Madame Caumartin (100 x 125 cm.), composition whose is practically identical to that of the canvas at the Stockholm, its copy at Masp, etc. Among Nattier’s other portraits of Madame Henriette, the canvas in which he depicted her as Flora (Palace of Versailles) is one of his masterpieces.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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