UC Davis

Marie Antoinette, as the last queen of France, is arguably the most overdetermined personality of the eighteenth-century French aristocracy. Ample scholarly attention has recently been paid to understanding how queendom was both inscribed and subverted in her personal appearance and comportment. Less studied is the manner in which her furniture and personal spaces negotiated her relationship to the absolute French monarchy, especially those commissioned in the final years of the ancien régime. Analyzing an embroidered bergère à la reine designed by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Sené for Marie Antoinette’s toilette at the Château de Saint Cloud as a case study–both in its original context and in the restaged Crillon Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art–this thesis argues that furniture played an integral role in aristocratic self-fashioning and continues to both create and convey malleable historical meanings today.