Alexander Kucharski is today an almost completely forgotten painter from the second half of the 18th century. He rose to fame in the history of art as a portraitist of Queen Marie Antoinette and the French aristocracy. He was probably one of the first prominent Polish artists to live and work in France. Kucharski is the author of the last known portrait of the Queen, dating from the time when she was confined to Temple Prison. This painting is in the collection of the Palace of Versailles.

Aleksander Kucharski was born on 18 March 1741 in Warsaw, to a noble family. In Poland, he studied under Marcello Bacciarelli. Thanks to a scholarship and the patronage of Stanisław August Poniatowski, he went to Paris, where, under the tutelage of Carl van Loo and Joseph-Marie Vien, he continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Against the king's wishes, according to which he was to become a history painter, Kucharski specialised in portraits. He continued this subject for the rest of his career. Using oil painting and pastel techniques, he created intimate portraits showing the mental features of the model. He also did not shy away from miniature painting, popular among portraitists of the time. He worked mainly on commissions from the French aristocracy, but he also made several portraits of Poles living in Paris, including Teresa and Maria Czartoryska and Ignacy and Stanisław Kostka Potocki.

It was not until his portraits of Marie Antoinette that he became truly famous. Kucharski was known as the queen's last painter. He probably created her images as early as 1780, but only a few later paintings are known today.

Unfinished pastel

Despite losing his royal scholarship in 1768, Kucharski had no intention of leaving Paris. His previously established professional position and contacts among the aristocracy enabled him to reach the court of the most important family in France - the royal family. When Marie Antoinette's court portraitist Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun left the country in 1789 for fear of an impending revolution, Alexander Kucharski took her place. Although he was never officially given this title, the images he created of Marie Antoinette made his mark in art history as a painter of the Queen.

The first of the paintings is an unfinished pastel from 1791 in the collection of the Palace of Versailles. The oval composition depicts the Queen in a semi-personal view. Kucharski managed to complete the portrait's face, while the rest of the figure was only sketched. Work on the painting was interrupted by the royal family's attempted escape from France and their detention in Varennes, from where they were sent back to Paris. Following this event, the Queen, along with her husband and children, was imprisoned at Temple.

Marie Antoinette at Temple

From the Queen's time in Temple comes her last known image. The so-called 'prison' portrait was painted by Kucharski in 1793. According to tradition, the original of this work was supposed to have been painted entirely from nature, in pastel, in the Temple or Conciergerie prison (where the queen resided from 2 August 1793). It is certain that Kucharski visited the Queen during her confinement at Temple between 26 January and 1 April 1793. He probably made sketches and studies of her widow's dress then, and completed the work in his studio. Undoubtedly, Kucharski used the aforementioned pastel image of the Queen when painting her face.

Marie Antoinette is depicted wearing the black mourning veil she assumed after the death of Louis XVI. Her proud gaze focuses on the viewer, her silhouette cut off against the grey stone wall of the prison. At the time of this portrait, the Queen was 37 years old, shortly afterwards - on 16 October 1793 - she was executed on the guillotine.

The painting by Kucharski was a great success and lived to see many replicas made both by the author's own hand and by his pupils and imitators. The work preserved in the Palace of Versailles is one of them. Another replica, already painted by Kucharski's pupil Aglaé Barbot, is in the collection of the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

The painter's work from this period is also a portrait of the then 7-year-old Dauphin Louis XVII. Executed in 1792, the painting has also been copied many times. The best-known version, initially mistakenly attributed to E. Vigée-Lebrun, is in the Petit Trianon palace at Versailles.

The post-revolutionary reality

After his role as portraitist to Marie Antoinette, Kucharski had no other major achievements in his career. When post-revolutionary France ran out of his former clients, he supported himself by graphically reproducing previously created images. Little is known about the last years of his life. In 1800, he married Marguarite Charvet in Paris, and from 1815 he stayed at the Parisian asylum Sainte-Périne and received a pension from King Louis XVIII. Towards the end of his life, his financial situation deteriorated rapidly, so that Kucharski was forced to sell off his entire estate. He died on 5 November 1819. He was probably buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, but according to some this is only a symbolic burial.