ABSTRACT
Some of the official portraits produced of the princesse de Lamballe—a ghostly chalk drawing by Henri-Pierre Danloux and Claude Bornet's sober miniature—seem eerily to foreshadow her untimely end. In fact, the princesse de Lamballe continued to be pictured until the very day of her death, when Madame Tussaud was instructed to take a cast from the princess's decapitated head. The sheer number and range of portraits executed of the princess are far more considerable than has been supposed. The afterlife of many of the princess's portraits, as well as that of objects derived from her collection treated with a reliquary-like reverence, has been one of fetishised martyrdom closely interwoven with the propaganda that attended the royalist cult of Marie-Antoinette. The princess's engagement with the cult of sentiment and advocacy of women artists is shown to have been allied to the sorority encouraged by Marie-Antoinette within the women of her select circle.
