The Progress of Love: Love Letters

This is an early portrait of Caroline Murat wearing a pre-Napoléonic dress of plain material shaped by drapery and a waist band.

Joseph Caraud depicted pretty women with cats as a reflection of the times. Victorians were just opening their homes to pets as a symbol of their control over nature and the lower classes.

Georgian Rococo hairstyle. Photography: Tim Babiak. Model: Ariel Livingston. male model: Leslie Hethcox. Wigs and makeup: Allison Lowery.

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun made the rich look beautiful, before and after the French Revolution. Now she has a show of her own at the Met.

Marie Antoinette was the last queen of France prior to the French Revolution. She and her husband Louis XVI were executed by guillotine during the Regin of Terror, which soon followed. Over the years, she has been vilified as a woman who was out of touch with the common folk and was famously reported to have said that if the French people couldn’t eat bread, then “let them eat cake.” But was she really that bad, and did she really tell her subjects to eat cake?