Princess Marie d'Orléans in her studio

A great art lover himself, Louis-Philippe, still only Duke of Orléans, entrusted the artistic education of his children to the painter Ary Scheffer in 1822. Trained with his brother Henry in Pierre Guérin's studio, along with Léon Cogniet, Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault, Scheffer had already been exhibiting for ten years when, in 1822, he demonstrated his adherence to emerging aesthetic ideas with Les Ombres de Françoise de Rimini et son amant apparaissant à Dante et à Virgile. This highly Romantic subject, taken from Dante's Inferno, initiated a literary detour for the painter that continued with Goethe and Byron. Through contact with him, Ferdinand d'Orléans and Marie developed a taste they shared with their father for the "new school" that was blossoming in painting between the Salons of 1822 and 1827, but also in literature with their young friend Dumas and his generation.

Marie's initial talent for drawing was limited, despite a pronounced taste for Romantic literature, but she showed a greater aptitude for understanding volume, which Scheffer began practicing in 1834 through modeling exercises. The sculptress revealed herself, and her great success was Jeanne d'Arc en prière, carved in marble for the historical galleries of Versailles, then printed in several formats by Susse. The princess's work was abundant, and in 1837, when she married the Duke of Wurtemberg, she requested a portrait of herself as an artist.

The modernity of the education offered by Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amélie to their children is revealed in this choice. Ary Scheffer's composition, completed in 1838, is in fact all the more daring given that the sculptural work refers to an eminently masculine world, hardly worthy of a princess.

He produced several variations showing the young woman's work in progress. Scheffer's death on January 6, 1839 cast a pall over the family, but also over the whole of France, which was particularly attached to this princess, whom the art world mourned as one of its own. Louise, Queen of the Belgians and Marie's eldest sister, commissioned Scheffer to paint a replica of her portrait, which she later bequeathed to Philippe de Wurtemberg, the son who never knew his mother. The portrait remained in the family until 2022, when it was acquired by the Musée d'Orléans in a sale of the family's possessions in Munich, with the help of Cyrille Molina and Oakridge.