Marie-Anne of Saxony by Georg Desmarées

The painter Georg Desmarées (1697–1776), born in Stockholm, left for Amsterdam in 1724 and became a pupil and later a collaborator of the Swedish artist Peter Martin van Meytens (1695–1770). He then travelled to Nuremberg, and subsequently to Venice, where he received tuition from the painter Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. He settled in Munich in 1731, where he served as court painter until his death in 1776. It was during this period that he produced numerous official portraits now held at the Munich Residenz, which belonged to Princess Marie-Anne of Saxony (1728–1797), wife of Prince-Elector Maximilian III of Bavaria. She herself was Princess of Saxony and Poland (1728–1797), daughter of Prince-Elector Frederick Augustus of Saxony, the future King of Poland, and Archduchess Josephine of Austria. She had fourteen brothers and sisters, including Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, Dauphine of France and mother of the future Louis XVI, which therefore made her the aunt of the King of France. As her marriage produced no children, the union brought an end to the younger branch of the Wittelsbach family upon Maximilian’s death in 1777.

The earliest known portrait of her was sold at public auction in 2018. In it, Marie-Anne of Saxony is depicted as a young woman, with a town by a lake visible in the background. To her right, her greyhound stares intently at her as a sign of allegiance. It wears a light blue collar around its neck bearing the princess’s initials (SMAS). In the second portrait, which once hung at the Château d’Aulteribe and is now housed at the Hôtel de la Marine, Marie-Anne of Saxony appears much older, yet still coquettish enough to be depicted as Diana, like many of her contemporaries, and is always accompanied by her faithful greyhound. She is not the only one to have wished to immortalise her faithful companion, as shown by the painting by Jean-François Gilles Colson, (1733–1803), which was sold at public auction in 2016 at Drouot: a *Portrait of a Woman as Diana the Huntress*, dated 1755, depicts a greyhound in a similar pose. The evocation of mythological figures in portraiture serves to suggest specific qualities with which the sitter wishes to be associated: young like Hebe, beautiful like Venus, alluring like Diana.