Princess Marie of France

Princess Marie of France, also known as Marie d'Orléans (Palermo, 1813 - Pisa, 1839), was a French princess who devoted herself to sculpture and drawing. The daughter of King Louis-Philippe I and of Maria Amalia of the Two Sicilies, she is worth knowing because, as a woman of the high nobility, she received serious artistic training and built a body of work of her own during the July Monarchy.

Her father, then Duke of Chartres, insisted on a solid education for her. She became a pupil of Ary Scheffer, who recorded that she dreamed of a lofty life as an artist and of shaping the course of art in France. She had her own studio installed in the Tuileries Palace, where she worked. Contemporaries described her as lively and full of energy, with an interest in parties and politics alike.

Her first marriage project, to Leopold of the Two Sicilies, collapsed when the Neapolitan court demanded immediately a share of the Orléans fortune. The king considered the demand unreasonable, and the match was abandoned. In 1837 she married Duke Alexander of Württemberg at the Grand Trianon palace in Versailles. The couple had one son, Philipp, born in 1838.

Shortly after the birth, seriously ill with tuberculosis, she settled in Pisa, hoping the local climate would help her recover. She died there on 6 January 1839 and was buried in the Orléans Chapel at Dreux.

Many of her works survive, held in collections such as the Clark Art Institute, the Snite Museum of Art and the museum in Dordrecht in the Netherlands. She designed the windows of the Chapel of Saint Saturninus at the Palace of Fontainebleau, which were executed by Émile Wattier. In 2008 the Louvre devoted an exhibition to her, showing part of her work and personal belongings, which later travelled to the Musée Condé in Chantilly. Today she is remembered mainly as an example of a royal woman who pursued art seriously, although her output is little known outside museum collections.