L'Entrée de son altesse royale la duchesse d'Orléans dans le jardin des Tuileries le 4 juin 1837, by Eugène Lami

Ferdinand-Philippe, duc d'Orléans, was the eldest son and heir of Louis-Philippe, King of the French and, deep into his twenties, he needed a wife. The fact that at the July Revolution of 1830 his father had assumed the throne of France as a constitutional monarch - the head of the cadet branch of the Bourbons replacing members of the senior line - thereby alienating the other royal courts of Europe, made securing a dynastic marriage rather problematic. After an exhaustive search, a relatively minor royal, not even Catholic, Princess Hélène de Mecklenburg-Schwerin, was chosen; not considered a beauty, but described as ambitious, it is said she accepted the proposal against the will of her family with the prospect of becoming a queen. The couple met for the first time a day before their wedding, which was celebrated on 30 May 1837 at the château de Fontainebleau. There were three wedding, actually: a civil marriage and two religious ones, first Catholic and then - the new duchess retaining her protestant faith - Lutheran. Though virtual strangers to each other on their wedding day, the couple would go on to have two sons and a very happy marriage until his accidental death at the age of only thirty-two.

France had not celebrated the marriage of an heir to the throne since the arrival of Marie Antoinette in 1770. And so the entry into Paris on a beautiful, sunny Sunday was a cause of great excitement in the capital. On the morning of June 4 the King, the newlyweds, and all the members of the royal family had left the château de Fontainebleau for Paris, to present the new duchesse d'Orléans to the Parisians and take up residence at the city domicile of the royal family, the palais des Tuileries. At noon the royal party had entered Paris by way of the Barrière de l'Étoile, and at four in the afternoon the procession entered the Tuileries garden from the Place de la Concorde, greeted by crowds of cheering Parisians.

In setting his scene, Lami has chosen the moment when the procession split in two in order to bypass the great octagonal basin at the far end of the garden. Among the figures, we can identify, at center right on a white horse, Louis-Philippe. The King is accompanied by his second son, the duc de Nemours, and General Bernard, Intendant des Tuileries, on his right. And on his left by his third son, the prince de Joinville, and Marshal Lobau. The duc d'Orléans rides next to the carriage, where his wife is joined by her stepmother, the Dowager Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin - the only member of the bride's family to have attended the marriage ceremonies - and Queen Marie-Amélie and three of her daughters: Marie, Clémentine, and Louise, Queen of the Belgians.

The ladies in the carriage are not much more than a collection of bonnets. But it looks as though the new duchesse is standing... which seems rather odd.

Eugène Lami was just becoming - and would remain into the next régime - the great chronicler of high-society and royal/imperial family life, public and private, in both France and England. He is much better known for his ravishing, frothing watercolors than for his more sedate oil paintings; I think it would be fair to say that the latter fare less well than the former. Here we have two versions of the same scene, the second either a preparatory sketch or a variant copy. I think this second version is much more congenial. The color is better, the brushwork looser. (It may be that it's in gouache rather than oil; I haven't been been able to find out.) And his view of the spectators all turned toward the carriage is more appropriate, makes more sense than in the first painting where ladies and gentlemen loll about in the foreground, quite decorative, but content to ignore the passing of the carriage, their only reason for being there in the first place.