ABSTRACT
The reign of Marie-Antoinette witnessed a social, cultural and artistic rapprochement between France and Britain that was entirely without precedent. The first prominent member of Marie-Antoinette's court to make the journey was the committed Anglophile and brother-in-law to the princesse de Lamballe, the duc de Chartres, in 1783, in the spring of 1787. A second portrait was produced of the princesse de Lamballe during her visit to England, though entirely without her involvement. Historians have generally attributed the purpose of the princesse de Lamballe's 1787 visit to an attempt to address her poor health with a period of convalescence and we do indeed have confirmation in the princess's own words that she took the waters in English spa towns. John Leigh has observed that for the French, Anglomania was a means of trying 'new ways of feeling as well as thinking' and that in this spirit, 'English gardens were ultimately as influential as the English Philosophers who walked in them'.
