The Archduchess Maria Teresa of Austria

The Archduchess Maria Teresa of Austria (1762–1770) was one of the youngest children of Emperor Joseph I and a niece of Marie Antoinette — she died at age eight, making this 1771 portrait, now in the Prado, a posthumous or near-posthumous dynastic record. Child royal portraiture in the Habsburg dynasty was produced as much for dynastic documentation and family connection as for the pleasure of the individual depicted, and a portrait of a child who had died was particularly charged with memorial significance. Mengs's depiction of a Habsburg child — produced during his second Madrid period — reflects the Spanish court's deep familial connections to the Vienna-based Habsburgs, for whom commemorative portraiture served diplomatic as well as emotional purposes.

A portrait produced after the subject's death — or very shortly before it, when the child was already ill — would have relied either on earlier sittings, earlier portraits, or formal compositional conventions rather than direct observation. Mengs's handling of a young child's face in potentially idealised or posthumous circumstances differs from his more directly observed adult portraiture.