Presumed portrait of Anne Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé (1676-1753), Duchess of Maine, by Pierre Gobert's studio

The blue coat with ermine lining of our model indicates her rank as a duchess or princess, but the personality remains difficult to identify with certainty as the overall treatment tends to blur certain identifications. The oblong face with large blue eyes, the long nose and full, rosy cheeks, and the porcelain-like complexion are typical of the portrait painter Pierre Gobert, a prolific artist who produced a large number of portraits with fixed, fairly repetitive attitudes. As a result, a large number of portraits regularly come up for sale whose attribution is uncertain.

The young woman, seen from the front at mid-body, is dressed in a rich brocade gown, the neckline of which, trimmed with pearls, reveals a fine lace. The throat is fresh, without jewels, and the hairstyle is simple. This portrait has been compared with the much more refined portrait of the Duchess of Maine, kept at the Domaine de Sceaux. While there is an undeniable "kinship" in the resemblance, the very basic treatment of the face in the portrait conserved in the Château de Champs makes the comparison highly uncertain. On the other hand, the precision of the brocade rendering suggests that the work may have come from Pierre Gobert's workshop.

Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon, known as "Mademoiselle d'Enghien" and later "Mademoiselle de Charolais", Duchess of Maine, was the granddaughter of the Grand Condé and Prince de Condé. In 1692, she married Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, Duke of Maine (1670-1736), the legitimate bastard son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. They had seven children, all without issue.

Hurt by having to marry a legitimated prince, she urged her husband to join the Cellamare conspiracy in 1718, with a view to having the regency assigned to the King of Spain. The Regent had had Louis XIV's will overturned, giving his legitimated bastards precedence over the princes of the blood, thus removing the Duc du Maine from the regency councils. Kept under surveillance for a time, the couple returned to Sceaux in 1720, where they now did nothing but hold court. The "little court of Sceaux" welcomed writers and artists, including some of the greatest French minds of the time, to nocturnal costume parties where erudition was also the order of the day. The after-death inventory of the duchess's library lists more than three thousand books.