Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

N. Jeffares, A Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, online edition, no. J.76.178.

This oval portrait of the Marquise Camille Dubois de la Motte, née Marie-Félicité-Michelle-Antoinette de Pons, is a pastel signed and dated 1778. Probably born in 1764, she was the daughter of the Marquis Louis Marie de Pons, French Ambassador to Sweden from 1783 to 1789, and she assisted him in his diplomatic activities at the court of Gustav III. In 1778, she married Emmanuel-Paul-Vincent Cahideuc, Marquis Dubois de la Motte. It was in Sweden that she met and became close friends with Sophie Piper, sister of Axel von Fersen, known for his liaison with Queen Marie-Antoinette. However, when diplomatic relations between France and Sweden were broken off as a result of the Russo-Swedish War, she was forced to return to France, then in the midst of revolutionary upheaval. 

Posed against a landscape background, in this composition the young Marquise is wearing a graceful Trianon striped grey silk dress, enhanced with silver brocade and an opaline tint. Her powdered hair, falling in dragonnes, is decorated with a band of pastel-coloured flowers. A delicate, diaphanous collarette completes her outfit, with its pearly, shimmering appearance.

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie-Antoinette’s portrait painter, a discerning observer of both French and Russian aristocracy, used pastel for this portrait, a technique her father had taught her when she was young. She used it not only for sketches and portraits but also landscapes, in particular when she was in Switzerland after the French Revolution, though only a few of these have survived.