The familiar image of La Belle Chocolatière (the beautiful chocolate girl) has graced Baker’s product packaging and advertisements for nearly one hundred and thirty years. The legend of Baker’s well-known trademark – La Belle, as she is affectionately known – began in the 1870s. Inspired by a painting and a romantic tale of a young eighteenth-century Austrian woman, this legend, as with most, is hard to verify.

Yet fact or fiction, because La Belle’s image has successfully survived in a variety of forms for over a century, the story of the painting, the artist and how La Belle came to represent Baker’s Chocolate deserves to be told.