REPRESENTING RIVALRY ON THE EVE OF REVOLUTION: ADÉLAÏDE LABILLE-GUIARD'S PORTRAIT OF MADAME ADÉLAÏDE OF FRANCE AND ELISABETH VIGÉE-LEBRUN'S PORTRAIT OF MARIE ANTOINETTE WITH HER CHILDREN

My thesis places Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s 1787 portrait of Madame Adélaïde, daughter of King Louis XV, in the context of royal power struggles on the eve of the 1789 revolution. I consider the portrait as a form of public self-fashioning, in which the patron sought to position herself as a dutiful daughter to Louis XV and thereby to remind viewers of the Bourbon dynasty’s glorious history. Exhibited in the Salon of 1787, at a moment of growing discontent with the reign of Louis XVI, the portrait helped to distance Madame Adélaïde from her nephew and his notorious Queen, Marie Antoinette, whose portrait by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun hung in the same room. Previous interpretations of this work have interrogated the motives of the painter, emphasizing Labille-Guiard’s pursuit of influential patrons and her career ambitions. Building on those accounts, I shift focus to the role of the patron, Madame Adélaïde, in shaping this image. I construe its complex iconography as a response to Marie Antoinette’s public digressions, which included Vigée-Lebrun’s controversial portrait of the queen “en chemise,” exhibited at the Salon of 1783. I provide a close reading of Labille-Guiard’s painting and its reception vis-à-vis Vigée-Lebrun’s 1787 portrait of Marie Antoinette, which presented the Queen as mother and vessel for the continuation of the Bourbon line. Examining these female patrons’ use of large-scale Salon portraits to shape their public image, and that of the monarchy more broadly, I conclude that each woman presented herself as an ideal royal figure, and as a solution for the future direction of France at a time of burgeoning political unrest.