Potato flowers in the hairstyle of an 1783 portrait by Alexander Roslin

This portrait of 1783 by the eighteenth-century Swedish painter Alexander Roslin is sometimes called a portrait of Marie Antoinette, more rarely of Madame de Lamballe; in catalogues the picture passes as a portrait of an unknown lady, which sounds closer to the truth. But what is interesting is not the heroine herself but her coiffure, adorned with flowers. Potato flowers. As you can see, potato blossoms are highly decorative: the petals come in various shades from deep lilac to white, the inflorescences have a handsome form, and they keep for a long time without dropping. The fashion for decorating hairstyles and dress with potato flowers is indeed connected with Marie Antoinette, who appeared at a royal banquet in 1785 with such a bouquet in her hair, but I would not ascribe to her alone the popularisation of the potato as a beautifully flowering crop: after all, it was not only the French queen who had taste in all of Europe