Winterhalter and Eugénie - le chapeau de paille - 1857

This portrait of the Empress - Winterhalter's fifth, if I count correctly - was commissioned by Eugénie, herself, and given to comte Félix Bacciochi, the Emperor's cousin and First Chamberlain of the court. Part of the preserved collection of Marjorie Merriweather Post, it hangs in the drawing room of her Hillwood estate in Washington D.C.

The frame - with Imperial eagle, mantle, and crown - is original to the painting.

The drawing room at Hillwood.

Like most royal portraits of the time, the painting was engraved for reproduction.

***

Interestingly - OK, interesting to me, anyway - the straw hat that gives this painting its informal title was first considered for use in Winterhalter's masterpiece, the vast painting of the Empress surrounded by her dames du palais. It can be seen in this preliminary sketch:

The finished painting: l'Impératrice Eugénie entourée de ses dames d'honneur, 1855.

Emperor Napoleon III, by Alexandre Cabanel, 1865

The Emperor is seen, unusually, in evening dress rather than uniform; in every other way - the crown and sceptre; the sash and star of the Légion d'honneur; the ermine-trimmed mantle; the throne - this is a state portrait. The setting is the Salon Louis XIV of the Tuileries palace. At the time of its completion, the portrait was criticized as being unflattering, for not sufficiently camouflaging the Emperor's lack of stature and his thickening waistline; critics of both the painting and its subject said it resembled nothing more than a "portrait d'un maître d'hôtel". But it was apparently well received within the Imperial family. And his wife, the Empress Eugénie, thought it very like, capturing her husband perfectly; she had the painting hung in her private apartments at the Tuileries, and it was one of the paintings she requested be returned to her in her exile in England. The portrait was long thought lost, but has been found and restored and is now at Compiègne.

A wonderfully precise yet poetic passage.

***

Alexandre Cabanel (28 September 1823, Montpellier – 23 January 1889, Paris), French academic painter of historical, classical, and religious subjects, he was also well known as a portrait painter. At seventeen he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied with François-Édouard Picot. He first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1844, and the next year won the Prix de Rome. Cabanel was elected a member of the Institute in 1863, and was appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1864, where he taught until his death. Cabanel was closely connected to the Paris Salon, winning the grande médaille d'honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867, and 1878. He was a regular member of the Salon jury and, perhaps not surprisingly, his legions of pupils were constant exhibitors. Through those students, Cabanel had perhaps more influence than any other artist of his day in shaping the sensibilities of Belle Époque French painting. He died in Paris at the age of sixty-five.

A study for the Emperor's portrait.

He is best remembered today as one of the leading members of the Salon jury of 1863 which refused two-thirds of the work submitted for exhibition, including that of Courbet and, most famously, Manet and others who would soon come to be known as Impressionists. The resulting scandal was such that, in a conciliatory gesture, the Emperor arranged for the refused artists to have their own exhibition; the resulting Salon des Refusés is seen by many as marking the birth of the Impressionist movement.

The same year, 1863, is also the date of the only one of Cabanel's paintings that is still well known.  His almost ridiculously erotic La Naissance de Vénus - the birth of Venus - was a great success at the Salon that year and was immediately snapped up by the Emperor for his private collection.

Fête de nuit aux Tuileries, le 10 juin 1867, by Pierre Tetar van Elven, 1867

This painting commemorates a fête given on the occasion of the visit of foreign sovereigns to the International Exposition of 1867. Walking in the garden, the Empress Eugénie is on the arm of the Emperor Alexander II of Russia while, behind them, the French Emperor Napoléom III is engaged in conversation with King Wilhelm I of Prussia. Only four years later, France will lie defeated - her emperor in German custody, her empress fled to England - and Wilhelm of Prussia will be proclaimed Emperor of a united Germany in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, while the venerable Tuileries Palace will be a burned out shell.

***

Pierre Henri Théodore (Petrus Henricus Theodorus) Tetar van Elven (30 August 1828, Molenbeek-Saint-Jean - 5 January 1908, Milan), Dutch painter, watercolorist, and etcher.

***

The dramatic staircase connecting the gardens with the salle des Maréchaux - the palace's primary ballroom - was a temporary construction, built for the occasion. I was very happy to see this painting - not at all technically adept, but very evocative, and which I've known in reproduction since childhood - at the recent Tuileries Gardens exhibition at the Portland Art Museum.

The Empress Eugénie, by Winterhalter, 1862

The Empress Eugénie in eighteenth-century costume, by Winterhalter, 1854

The Empress Eugénie had a great attachment to the aesthetics and royal artifacts of the eighteenth century French court and, especially, a fascination for Marie Antoinette.  She would frequently appear at costume balls wearing gowns based on or inspired by those to be seen in portraits of her tragic royal predecessor.  This theatrical image of Eugénie was painted only a year after she became empress, and is one of the lesser known of Winterhalter's paintings of her.

Below is a photograph of the Empress wearing the same costume as she wears in the painting.  Since this obviously isn't a portrait photograph, it's likely that it was taken for Winterhalter to use as a reference for details of the costume.

The Emperor and Empress of the French, equestrian portraits by Charles-Édouard Boutibonne, 1856

The now lost Château de Saint-Cloud is seen in the distance.  Boutibonne's study with Winterhalter is evident in the treatment of the background.

It is believed that Boutibonne collaborated with John Frederick Herring, as he had with the similar portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, with Boutibonne painting the figures and Herring the horses.  All four painting were completed in the same year, with the queen commissioning the portraits of the French couple, and she and Prince Albert giving their respective portraits to each other as gifts.  All four paintings remain in the Royal Collection today.  I think the painting of the Empress is, by far, the most successful.  In color and pose and atmosphere; it's also a good likeness.  The portrait of the Emperor is passable, the Queen's dull, and that of the Prince Consort really quite awkward.

***

Charles-Édouard Boutibonne (8 July 1816, Budapest – 7 February 1897, Wilderswil bei Interlaken), French academic painter, whose work included history and genre subjects, and portraits. Born in Hungary to French parents, he was a pupil of Friedrich von Amerling in Vienna, before later moving to Paris, where he studied with Achille Devéria and Winterhalter. He spent some time in London during the 1850s, and he showed regularly at the Paris Salon during the 1860s.

In her youth, the Empress was a brilliant and fearless horsewoman who, rather scandalously for the time, always rode astride her horse
rather than using the customary sidesaddle.  After her marriage - and certainly for an "official" depiction - she assumed the more
conventional, "ladylike" position.  I love the color and rendering of her shot silk riding habit.

John Frederick Herring, Sr. (12 September 1795, London – 23 September 1865, Meopham Park), English artist, known for his paintings of horses. In 1845, he gained the patronage of Queen Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent, and subsequently that of the queen, herself, which he held until his death.

There is a second version of the Empress' portrait, with a slightly different setting and alterations in coloration.  The background is even
more Winterhalter-esque than the first.  This version is lovely, too, but I find it much less "poetic" than the one in the Royal Collection.

Likewise, there is a second version of the Emperor's portrait, again, with small alterations.  Both of these paintings are dated 1857.  The
description of the horses in these later versions is much less secure, and I would guess that Herring was not involved in their execution.

Christmas Card 2013

It's time for this year's Christmas card "reveal".  G and I didn't share responsibility for the image this go 'round; with a show coming up, I didn't feel I had time for the necessary back and forth negotiating it normally takes to put our card together.  So I did all the Photoshopping and she did all the printing and assembly.

My starting point was the paired state portraits of the Empress Eugénie and Napoléon III by Winterhalter - nice Christmas-y color scheme if nothing else.

There are many, many versions of these two portraits; they're all copies.  The originals are
presumed to have been destroyed when the Tuileries Palace was burnt in 1871.

Rather than the usual oil painting, I believe this image is of one of the tapestry copies of the empress'
portrait; the general tone is brighter in color, and some of the details are more generalized.

Already, the two were nicely oriented toward each other, and the lighting came from the same direction.  It was fun to blend the join between the two backgrounds - draperies, trees and palace - and make it look like it was all one big painting.  I had to do away with the crowns - Nicholas needed to be the master here, not either of us - and then I needed to establish a centrally-located draped table and cushion.  I copied and warped elements from the existing tables and took much of the cushion itself from another Winterhalter painting, the Garter portrait of Queen Victoria.  (Which I recently posted about here.)

There was much fussing: a lot of color adjustment (the red in the emperor's portrait was much less so than in the empress'), subtracting details and then camouflaging the subtraction, copying and adjusting details, then moving them to a different location.  When all that was done, it had gone from this:

To this:

Then to add our faces.  You may not be surprised that G's face went on the boy body, and mine went on the girl's; that's just how we do things around here.

We were pretty easy to do, but Nicholas was a little harder.  Because of the lighting, the table and cushion where he was sitting was quite shadowed, so I had to "shadow" his lower half, as well, but making it seem that light might reach the upper part.  Also, in the original photograph, his right ear had light shining through it and glowed bright red; it just looked wrong.  Blending elements from his left ear and adjusting the color and lighting, I "constructed" a better right ear.

Then he needed some princely ornament.  Because of his tiny head and his big ears, I couldn't get any sort of proper crown on him.  At first, I thought I might just go with a jeweled collar: this being a pearl and diamond bracelet - French, of the same period as the portraits, actually - that I Photoshopped in:

I still like this version much better.  (I also had to lose some of the background details;
they were visually distracting once Nicholas was added to the image.)

But I agreed with G that, scaled down to the actual card size, this would just look like he was wearing a regular collar.  So I eventually settled on adding an emerald brooch (which had belonged to Catherine the Great) to his collar, and topping his little head with the Duchesse d'Angoulême's - much warped - emerald and diamond tiara, once part of the French crown jewels.  I did a lot of work on these two last items, but I still don't think they hold up as well in close-up as other parts of the finished image.  From a distance, though, they add the desired "princely ornament" and a bit more Christmas-cognisant green.

If Nicholas is distressed at having to wear "girl jewelry", he's been too diplomatic to mention it.

Paca, Duchess of Alba by Winterhalter, 1854

In the collection of the dukes of Alba, Palacio Liria, Madrid.

María Francisca de Sales "Paca" de Portocarrero Palafox y Kirkpatrick, 12th Duchess of Peñaranda, etc. (January 29, 1825, Málaga - September 16, 1860, Carabanchel), the beloved elder sister of the Empress Eugénie, married Jacobo Luis Francisco Pablo Rafael Fitz-James Stuart y Ventimiglia, 15th Duke of Alba, etc. (June 3, 1821, Palermo - July 10, 1881, Madrid), on February 14, 1844 in Madrid.  She died of a undiagnosable spinal ailment at the age of thirty-five, leaving three young children.

 ***

I first saw a black and white reproduction of this painting back when I was a teenager and in the midst of my mania for her sister, the empress.  I've had to wait this long to find an image in color; I think it was worth the wait - and, incidentally, gorgeous.

Les Diamants de la couronne de France

In 1887, in an effort to prove that they'd finally accomplished what their great revolution of 102 years previous had failed pitifully to do - make France not a monarchy - the French government decided to sell off their crown jewels.  The last occupant of a French throne, Napoléon III, had been booted in 1871, and much of the truly impressive horde of jewelry had been created for his wife, the Empress Eugénie.  Existing jewels from the state treasury were often used in these commissions, and so these new pieces were considered state property rather than personal.  The empress had fled Paris at the Empire's fall with pretty much just the clothes on her back and, though the French government eventually returned much of her personal property - her Winterhalter paintings for example - they felt justified in withholding the sparkly things.

The cover and some illustrations from the catalogue of photographic plates by the photographer Berthaud - Diamants, Perles et Pierreries provenant de la Collection dite des Joyaux de la Couronne. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1887:

The sale was heavily promoted and much commented on in the press.  In the end, it appears that - somehow - the sale didn't manage to be terribly profitable.

A vintage photograph of a display of the diamond jewelry.

A vintage photograph of a display of the ruby and diamond jewelry.

In much the same way that, having sold off the contents of Versailles and other royal palaces during the French Revolution, the current republic continues to frantically - and at great cost - buy back whatever pieces of royal provenance it can get its hands on, they have also reacquired several of the long lost crown jewels.  Most of the "resurrected" reside today in the galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre.

The emerald tiara made by royal jewelers Evrard and Frédéric Bapst in 1819 for the duchesse d'Angoulême - Marie Thérèse
Charlotte de France, only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette - it was acquired by the Louvre in 2002.

The tiara in its case in the Louvre.

Pair of ruby bracelets that also belonged to the duchesse d'Angoulême; created by Paul-Nicolas Menière
and Evrard Bapst in 1816 and part of a large parure.  They were donated to the Louvre in 1973.

Emerald necklace and earrings made by Nitot et fils for the Empress Marie Louise, second wife
of Napoléon I.  Originally part of a large parure, they were bought by the Louvre in 2004.

A remarkable survival:  the tasseled diamond bow-knot brooch of the Empress Eugénie.  Made by François Kramer in 1855,
altered in 1864, it spent more than a century in the collection of the Astor family, and was purchased by the Louvre in 2008.

The pearl and diamond diadem of the Empress Eugénie, made by Gabriel Lemonnier, circa 1853 - well-known from the state
portrait by Winterhalter - and resold soon after the auction, in 1890, to Albert, prince von Thurn und Taxis.  It remained
in the family for over one hundred years, until it was bought at auction by the société des amis du Louvre in 1992.

The state portrait of the Empress Eugénie, after Winterhalter.  (The original
painting is presumed destroyed in the burning of the Tuileries palace in 1871.)