Maria Theresia (1816-1867), daughter of Karl of Nassau-Weilburg

Maria Theresia of Nassau-Weilburg, painted by Lawrence in 1818 during his Vienna sojourn for the Waterloo Chamber project and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, was a young princess of the Central European Habsburg-connected nobility whose marriage to Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies would connect her to the most conservative branch of the restored Bourbon dynasties. The Kunsthistorisches Museum's holding places this portrait within Vienna's greatest art collection — a fitting institutional home for a princess of the Austrian court world Lawrence was encountering during his European tour. At seventeen or eighteen when painted, Maria Theresia was on the marriage market in the most active sense, and Lawrence's portrait would have been seen by potential royal suitors and their advisors as documentation of her physical appearance and bearing. The Viennese court setting that Lawrence encountered during this visit — the elaborate ceremonial culture of the Habsburg imperial family, the concentration of European royalty attending the post-Napoleonic diplomatic conferences — provided the most complex social environment he had ever navigated, and the series of portraits he produced there, including this one, show his technique responding to the distinctive atmospheric qualities of Central European court portraiture.

Lawrence brings his full powers of flattery and elegance to this portrait of a young princess, with the luminous treatment of skin and the graceful arrangement of costume that characterized his most admired female portraits. The Viennese setting may have encouraged a slightly more formal, Continental treatment than his English works.