Mademoiselle de Clermont en sultane

Nattier's 1733 'Mademoiselle de Clermont en sultane,' in the Wallace Collection, is among the most celebrated examples of the turquerie genre in French portraiture — depicting Marie Anne de Bourbon-Condé, Mademoiselle de Clermont, in the costume of an Ottoman sultana. Turquerie was at its height in French court culture in the 1720s–1740s, driven by the continued fascination with Ottoman luxury goods, diplomatic contact with Constantinople, and Montesquieu's use of Persian and Turkish perspectives for social satire. For Nattier, the Turkish costume offered exceptional technical opportunity: brilliant fabric colours, complex textile patterns, jewelled accessories, and turban shapes quite unlike any European fashion. The Wallace Collection, with its extraordinary concentration of French Rococo art and decorative objects, provides an ideal institutional context for this defining work.

The Turkish costume required Nattier to deploy his full range of fabric rendering: the heavy silk of the outer robe, the lighter fabric of the inner garment, jewelled accessories catching light with metallic highlights, and the elaborately wrapped turban. He uses a rich, saturated palette — deep purples, golds, and reds — that differs markedly from the pale, silvery tonalities of his European-dress portraits.