Louis XVI, King of France
Dimensions
Plate: 8 3/4 × 6 5/16 in. (22.3 × 16 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Susan Dwight Bliss, 1956
Accession Number
56.558.60
Tags
Art Historical Context
This intimate print portrait of Louis XVI, King of France, captures the monarch in 1783, at the height of his reign mounting national tensions. Created by an anonymous French artist, it exemplifies the 18th-century tradition of disseminating royal imagery through prints, which served as both propaganda and popular souvenirs. Louis XVI, depicted in formal attire, symbolizes the opulent Ancien Régime just years before the French Revolution erupted 1789, triggered partly by the kingdom's financial strains from supporting the American Revolution. As a small-scale plate measuring 8 3/4 × 6 5/16 in...
About the Artist
Anonymous, French, 18th century · 1700–1800
The artist known as Anonymous, French, 18th century, represents a collective of unidentified talents active roughly between 1700 and 1800, a period of profound artistic evolution in France from the opulent Rococo to the austere dawn of Neoclassicism and Revolutionary fervor. Little is documented about their personal training or mentors, as their anonymity obscures individual biographies, though th...