https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Marie_Antoinette_Young.jpg
I've become absolutely obsessed with this painting and I honestly think it's the most beautiful painting ever. I was going to base my final art project on this and I would really like to know some more about it. I researched and couldn't really find out that much about it other than that it's one of the early portraits that Martin did for royals. But it's sorta useless to do an art project about something you can't research that thoroughly.
Also sorta intersting how Martin was Swedish and one of her lovers was Swedish ( probably no correlation though. )
Are you certain that you have the name of the artist correct? I believe it may be Martin Van Meytens, rather than Meyers.
Meytens was a Swede, trained in art by his painter father. He spent time as an itinerant painter in the capitals of Europe before settling in Vienna, serving as court painter to the Habsburg court.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a super-robust scholarly literature on the man, especially in English. How's your German? There was an exhibition on him in Vienna in 2014 with an attendant catalog, entitled Martin van Meytens der Jüngere. Even if you can't read German, perhaps looking at other examples of his work in this catalogue will provide some inspiration. There is also a journal article available on a couple of his other works. You might get a sense of how another scholar has interpreted this painter's work, and see if these insights can help you understand the Marie Antoinette portrait you like: Brown, Bruce Alan. 1997. “"I Cacciatori Amanti": The Portrait of Count Giacomo Durazzo and His Wife by Martin Van Meytens the Younger”. Metropolitan Museum Journal 32. [University of Chicago Press, Metropolitan Museum of Art]: 161–74.
That said, not all is lost. If you can't find good monographs on an artist, you can still find out about him. Some suggestions include researching the practice of portraiture in Vienna in the first middle of the eighteenth century; late baroque and early rococo portraiture more generally; and the history of portraits of European rulers of the eighteenth century.
Finally, I suggest you familiarize yourself with Marie Antoinette's biography more generally. This portrait would have been painted in Vienna, as she was not married to the future Louis XVI until 1770, when she was just shy of 15 years old. The fact that she later had a Swedish lover surely had nothing to do with the man who painted her when she was 7 in a different city.
Hi! Just FYI, it would be worth x-posting this one to the art gang in /r/ArtHistory
