Three portraits of Marie Antoinette by a single artist, the Swedish painter Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller

Marie Antoinette sat for Wertmüller in 1785-88. He worked on commission from the Swedish king Gustav III. Besides the portrait of the queen with her children, Antoinette appeared on several other canvases.

The most intimate proved to be precisely the first version. This one, by all appearances, was never shown to the wider public, and this year it will be exhibited for the first time at the National Archives of France. A few years later Wertmüller painted several more portraits of the queen, drawing for the purpose on studio sketches from the past.

And if in the first portrait, probably intended for someone close to her, Marie Antoinette wears a very plain gown, bareheaded, with an open, youthful face, then in the second she is already in a more formal dress and a little hat, and although the angle is the same, the face looks somewhat more mature. The third version shows a different headdress; the queen gave this portrait to her chambermaid.

This often happened with royal portraits: august personages sat for an artist once in their lives, and he subsequently produced many variations on the image once captured, which was not necessarily a bad or a derivative thing. Earlier, for instance, I wrote about a whole series of portraits of Caroline Bonaparte, in which literally only the attire and the parures changed.