A recent study led by Professor Catriona Seth from the University of Oxford has challenged the long-held belief about a well-known childhood portrait thought to depict Marie Antoinette. The pastel drawing, created in 1762 by Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, has traditionally been seen as an image of the future Queen of France at age seven, holding a weaving shuttle and gazing directly at the viewer.
Through detailed analysis of Liotard’s works and archival documents, Professor Seth found evidence that the portrait is more likely to represent Marie Antoinette’s older sister, Maria Carolina, who later became Queen of Naples. According to Professor Seth, another portrait in the same series shows Marie Antoinette instead as a younger girl holding a rose and looking away.
Professor Seth explained: "I have always been fascinated by the picture said to be of Marie Antoinette as a child and even used it on the cover of a book I wrote 20 years ago. But while researching my latest book which centres on portraits of Marie Antoinette, something was niggling at me, so I went back to the MAH in Geneva to look more closely at Liotard’s full collection of portraits of Marie Antoinette and 10 of her siblings."
She continued: "The first clue came from what was thought to be a brooch worn by ‘Marie Antoinette’ in the portrait. The girl is wearing the medal of a specific order of chivalry which was conferred on Marie Antoinette and her sisters. But I realised Marie Antoinette, as the youngest sibling, did not receive hers until nearly four years after the portrait was taken – while Maria Carolina was awarded hers in 1762, when Liotard was in Vienna painting the imperial family. I worked out there had to have been a switch with the younger-looking child in one of the other portraits being Marie Antoinette, rather than Maria Carolina."
Professor Seth also pointed out: "The girl is wearing distinctive earrings that I managed to find in a subsequent picture of the queen of France. She is also holding a rose, which is a recurring feature of portraits of Marie Antoinette throughout her life."
At Geneva’s Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (MAH), Dr Marie-Eve Celio has also studied these portraits and noted that confusion over their subjects existed even when they entered MAH’s collection in 1947 due to mixed records.
Dr Celio stated: "I was very excited about prof. Seth’s discovery. At the MAH we have been investigating the provenance and the materiality of this prestigious series. We found out that the identity of the two sisters was already mixed up when these drawings entered the museum in 1947 thanks to the generosity of the Société auxiliaire du Musée (now Société des Amis du Musée d'Art et d'Histoire) and the Gottfried Keller Stiftung."
In response to these findings, Professor Seth and Dr Celio have launched INTERART—a new collaborative research project involving Oxford University, MAH Geneva, Idiap Research Institute, and Lausanne’s School of Criminal Justice—to improve methods for authenticating historical portraits using artificial intelligence alongside archival research.
"There have long been challenges to the accurate authentication of portraits," Dr Celio said. "We look at and compare for example the colours of the subjects’ eyes, but the pigments can change over time which means we don’t necessarily see what the artist meant."
Professor Seth added: "AI could transform how we look at portraits and people if we train it to assess how faces change with age or how different artists represent the same face. For example, if someone claims to have discovered a new portrait of Shakespeare, AI might learn from authenticated portraits of him to project how his face would have looked at the right time for the newly claimed identification."
Details about INTERART will be released later this year. An exhibition featuring Liotard's revised series will take place at MAH Geneva in autumn 2026.
Marc-Olivier Wahler, director at MAH Geneva commented: "While these remarkable portraits have been on display many times over the last 250 years, it will be extra special to see Marie Antoinette as she actually was, rather than mistaking her for her sister! It is so exciting to find out more about this major artist and I am very much looking forward to this fantastic interdisciplinary collaboration."