Fewer women have captured cultural imagination like Marie-Antoinette. Her fascination endures today, and it did so almost immediately after her death in the French revolution.

And one of her biggest fans, who sat at the helm of cult-like adoration for who they saw as a martyr queen, was Empress Eugénie.

Empress Eugénie was born in 1826, and became known as Eugénie de Montijo – a title which came from a different part of her family.

Her family were Spanish nobility, and she later married Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in 1853 after he became Napoleon III, Emperor of Second Empire France.

Eugénie had received much of her education in Paris, thanks to her family’s support of the French during the Napoleonic Wars not making them too popular in Spain.

This made Eugénie Empress of the French, until the fall of the second empire in 1870 and then Louis-Napoleon’s death in 1873, when she spent time exiled between England, Spain and France.

As Empress, Eugénie was fascinated by Empress Joséphine, wife of the original Napoleon, for family and dynastic reasons, but more so by Marie-Antoinette.

She helped shape a legend of Marie-Antoinette as a martyr queen who had been a model patron of the arts, a role that Louis-Napoleon saw as important to his wife, who he believed should be the one to restore the virtues of Empress Joséphine in this new French Empire.

She would go on to restore the Chateau of Malmaison, and then the Petit Trianon at Versailles for the 1867 Universal Exhibition of Paris. She would decorate all her interiors in Louis XV and XVI styles and obsess over collecting portraits and trinkets related to her favourite queen. She would talk to historians and diplomats about her (reportedly boring the Austrian ambassador for hours), live in the deceased queen’s spaces, and even had a copy of a Marie-Antoinette dress made for a costumed ball in the 1860s.

Her love of Marie-Antoinette was so famous that this Winterhalter portrait of her shows her in eighteenth-century costume and is sometimes even called the Empress Eugénie à la Marie Antoinette portrait.

For her part, Eugénie was a patron of the arts, and known as the Queen of Fashion. She reportedly never wore the same gown twice and would sell her wardrobe every year for charity. Eugénie saw herself even more in the journey of Marie-Antoinette after the second empire fell in 1870.

Her fascination for the queen, art, design and fashion saw a wider popularisation of eighteenth-century France as a design aesthetic, particularly hitting the homes of America’s Gilded Age titans – including this particularly nice example at the Flagler Mansion in Palm Beach.