Exhibition
Marie Antoinette Style
Sponsored by Manolo Blahnik
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Lunchtime Lectures: Queen of Style or Scandal? Negotiating Queenship, Identity, and Politics in the Portraits of Marie-Antoinette
This lecture is part of the free Lunchtime Lecture series. No booking is required.
“It is for you to set the tone at Versailles” (Maria Theresa to Marie-Antoinette)
Marie-Antoinette’s identity as an Austrian born “Reine de France et de Navarre” presented her as a double outsider in national politics, particularly at a time of revolutionary upheaval in eighteenth-century France. This paper explores the changing image of Marie-Antoinette in royally commissioned portraits. Beginning with the ‘Frenchified’ portraits of Marie-Antoinette which were completed in Austria around the time of Marie-Antoinette’s engagement to the dauphin of France in 1770. I examine the extent to which Marie-Antoinette’ image was negotiated and Frenchified in royal portraiture to ease her assimilation in France. This paper culminates with a visual analysis of Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun’s infamous portrait of Marie-Antoinette en Chemise, which caused a scandal when it was exhibited at the Salon du Louvre of 1783. I explore the three main histories of the chemise dress, the Rousseauian influence, and Marie-Antoinette’s female agency.
Tia Caswell recently submitted her PhD in Comparative Literature (French and German) to the University of Nottingham, titled, “Marie-Antoinette, l’Autrichienne and Victoria, the German Queen: Negotiating Gender and Foreignness in Satire and Portraiture” (2025).
Tia Caswell recently submitted her PhD in Comparative Literature (French and German) to the University of Nottingham, titled, “Marie-Antoinette, l’Autrichienne and Victoria, the German Queen: Negotiating Gender and Foreignness in Satire and Portraiture” (2025).
Tia has worked extensively with eighteenth and nineteenth-century archival material relating to Marie-Antoinette and Queen Victoria such as Queen Victoria’s personal papers, held at the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle. Tia’s research interests align with themes of queenship, identity, female agency, portraiture, and power. Her research background is in modern languages and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specialising in aspects of the French Revolution, and the visual representations of Marie-Antoinette, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Since 2023, Tia has published reviews of various eighteenth-century exhibitions in London for the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies online “Criticks” website.
