Three brothers, three kings - portraits of Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X

Dressed in the robes of the Ordre du Saint-Esprit.

Louis XVI, by Alexander Roslin, 1782.

The comte de Provence, the future Louis XVIII, by Antoine-François Callet, 1788. (The crown and regalia must have been added after he became king.)

The comte d'Artois, the future Charles X, by Antoine-François Callet, 1779.

And in their coronation robes; Louis XVIII chose to forgo a public coronation ceremony.

Louis XVI, by Antoine-François Callet, 1779.

Louis XVIII, by Robert Lefèvre, circa 1822.

Charles X, by François Gérard, 1825.

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And now for something a bit more realistic: a sketch for a coronation portrait of Louis XVIII by Antoine-François Callet, circa 1814 or later.

Jeune Berger, ou Adonis, by Barthélemy Blaise, 1785

Of white marble, the statue is 32 inches in height.

The story of Adonis has its source in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the first-century AD telling of the myth, he was conceived after Aphrodite cursed his mother Myrrha to lust after her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus. Myrrha had sex with her father in complete darkness for nine nights, but he then discovered her identity and chased her with a sword. The gods transformed her into a myrrh tree and, in the form of a tree, she gave birth to Adonis. Aphrodite found the infant and gave him to be raised by Persephone, the queen of the Underworld. Adonis grew into an astonishingly handsome young man, causing Aphrodite and Persephone to feud over him, with Zeus eventually decreeing that Adonis would spend one third of the year in the Underworld with Persephone, one third of the year with Aphrodite, and the final third of the year with whomever he chose. Adonis chose to spend his final third of the year with Aphrodite. One day, Adonis was gored by a wild boar during a hunting trip and died in Aphrodite's arms as she wept tears of sorrow. His blood mingled with her tears and became the anemone flower.

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Barthélemy Blaise (25 January 1738, Lyons - 2 April 1819, Paris), French sculptor. A student at the school of drawing in Lyon , he also studied in Rome. Back in Lyon by 1768, he worked regularly with the architect Martin Decrenice. He moved to Paris in 1785 and was soon accredited to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Adopting the neoclassical style, he exhibited his Jeune Berger, ou Adonis along with a Leda at the Salon of 1787. That same year he was given commissions by Louis XVI, including for the decoration of the not yet complete Panthéon, and for the mausoleum of the late Minister of State, the comte de Vergennes. During the Revolution, the artist was compelled to hide his work for the mausoleum - which was not installed in the church of Notre-Dame de Versailles until 1818, after the Restoration - then, during the Terror, he left Paris with his family. He later completed much work under the Bonaparte régime. He was awarded many commissions, both public and private, his subject matter ranging from religious and mythological imagery to portraiture.

The plaster model.

La Comtesse d'Artois et ses enfants, by Charles Emmanuel Leclercq, 1783.

The comtesse d'Artois, born Maria Teresa of Savoy (31 January 1756, Turin – 2 June 1805, Graz), who I wrote about recently, giving the briefest biography, had four children with her philandering husband, the future Charles X. Their first, Louis Antoine, duc d'Angoulême (6 August 1775, Versailles – 3 June 1844, Gorizia, Austria/Italy) was, for many years after the Revolution, heir presumptive to the Bourbon throne, and dauphin after his father became king in 1824. In 1799 he had been married to his first cousin, Marie Thérèse, the only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They would have no children.

The comtesse with her younger son, the five-year-old, Charles Ferdinand.

Their second child, Sophie (5 August 1776, Versailles – 5 December 1783, Versailles), was the first Bourbon princess of her generation; Marie Antoinette's first child, Marie Thérèse, would not be born for two more years. The princess would die at the age of seven in the same year that this family portrait was painted.

The elder son, eight-year-old Louis Antoine, and seven-year-old Sophie.

Charles Ferdinand, duc de Berry (24 January 1778, Versailles – 14 February 1820, Paris), was the third child. In 1816, after the Bourbon Restoration, he married Princess Maria-Carolina of Naples, with whom he had four children. (Both of the first two only lived for a day. He also produced numerous illegitimate offspring, both before and after his marriage.) In 1820, leaving the opera with his wife, he was stabbed, mortally wounded, and died the next day. The assassin was a Bonapartist opposed to the restored Bourbon monarchy. Seven months after his death, his wife gave birth to their fourth child, Henri, who is known in history as the comte de Chambord, and who in the view of Legitimists, was rightful heir to the throne of France. (Chambord would marry, but the marriage was childless; with his death in 1883, the legitimate male line of the main branch of the Bourbon monarchy became extinct.)

The fourth child, Marie Thérèse (6 January 1783, Versailles – 22 June 1783, Château de Choisy), died at only five months of age in the same year as this portrait was completed, presumably before it was even begun, as she doesn't appear in the painting.

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Charles Emmanuel Joseph Leclercq (1753, Brussels - 1821, Brussels), Flemish artist.  Leclercq - or Le Clercq - was one of the many artists working in Paris on the eve of the Revolution, producing small, highly decorative, but rather insipid and - frankly - often quite crude paintings, mostly portraits and genre scenes. It appears Leclercq studied in Rome from 1777 to 1780, and then worked in Paris from 1783 to 1790; it's likely the Revolution spurred his departure. I've been able to find no other information on this artist.

(Part of the frame seems to be missing in this photograph of the painting.)

Sisters, sisters-in-law - three royal portraits by Gautier-Dagoty

The comtesse de Provence, circa 1775. The comtesse gestures toward a bust of her husband and a portrait of her father.

The comtesse d'Artois, 1775. The comtesse directs our gaze toward a bust of her husband and a portrait of her mother.

Queen Marie Antoinette, 1775. Her first state portrait as Queen; Gautier-Dagoty would soon - thankfully - be supplanted by Vigée Le Brun.

Three French brothers, three brothers who would all be king of France in turn. (Although a revolution and a certain Corsican would interrupt the timeline.) And three foreign born brides, two of them sisters, only one who would be queen.

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In May of 1770, at the age of fourteen, recently married by proxy while still in Vienna, Marie Antoinette arrived at Versailles, the bride of the dauphin Louis Auguste who, four years later, would succeed his grandfather as Louis XVI. Pretty, vivacious, ill-educated and naïve, she charmed everyone, but was soon drawn into dangerous palace intrigues. And, far more troubling, for seven years, mostly through sexual ignorance, their marriage went unconsummated. The court and country were confounded at the lack of an heir and blamed the Autrichienne (which translates as "Austrian woman", but chienne is also the French word for female dog, or bitch) for her apparent barrenness, while the teenage girl - dauphine and then Queen - buried the very real disappointments of her marriage in a ceaseless round of entertainments. Innocent enough, but by the time her first child was born at the end of 1778 the damage to her reputation was irreparable. Marie Antoinette would have three more children... ah, but I think we all know the rest of her story....

Marie Joséphine of Savoy arrived at Versailles in May of 1771, almost exactly a year after her new sister-in-law, Marie Antoinette. The granddaughter of the King of Sardinia, she was eighteen, had also already been married by proxy, and was now the comtesse de Provence, bride of Louis Stanislas, younger brother of the dauphin - and who, after many years of exile, would become Louis XVIII in 1814. She did not make a good impression upon her arrival at Versailles, and was described as small, plain, with heavy eyebrows and a sallow skin, and what the groom's grandfather Louis XV called "a villainous nose". She had to be educated as to what was expected at the French court regarding hygiene and the necessity for a careful toilette, in particular with regard to her teeth and hair. Although she later claimed two miscarriages, it is almost certain that the couple's marriage was never consummated, and the marriage remained childless. She and her husband had a friendly relationship with the dauphin and dauphine until Louis XV died and the two succeeded to the throne, after which their relations soured. The Provence couple would live largely separate lives. The comtesse preferred to reside at her private estate, the Pavillon Madame in Montreuil, on which she spent lavishly, and where she had constructed a model village along the lines of Marie Antoinette's hameau at the Petit Trianon. It was rumored that she was alcoholic and, in spite of the strenuous objections of her husband - who had his own extra-marital, though probably non-physical relationships - she had an intense and steadfast romantic relationship with her lady-in-waiting, Marguerite de Gourbillon. Gourbillon would follow her mistress into exile until, in 1799, at the instigation of the comte de Provence, she was forcibly separated from the comtesse, who reacted with a public protest in front of the whole court; the scene caused a public scandal. She died in exile in England at the age of fifty-seven,

Marie Thérèse of Savoy, the younger sister of the comtesse de Provence was married to the youngest brother of the dauphin, Charles Philippe, comte d'Artois, at Versailles in November of 1773; she was not quite eighteen. She, too, had already been married in a proxy ceremony, at the palace of Stupinigi in Savoy. Like her sister before her, on arrival at the French court her appearance was judged harshly. She was described as small, ill-shaped, clumsy, with a long nose, and only her complexion attracted any admiration. She was regarded as "not distinguished in any sense", but nevertheless goodhearted; Marie Antoinette's brother, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, called her "a complete idiot". Like the Provence couple, the comte and comtesse d'Artois were among the circle of friends about the dauphin and dauphine; likewise, their friendship gradually deteriorated after the succession of Louis XVI to the throne in 1774. The following year, the comtesse d'Artois had her first child, a son, an event that further inflamed resentment against the Queen for her inability to produce an heir. The comtesse delivered two more children before the Queen had her first; there would be four children born to the Artois couple, but the two daughters would die in childhood. They left France three days after the fall of the Bastille, taking refuge in Savoy, but two years later, the comte d'Artois left his wife, eventually settling with his mistress, the comtesse de Polastron, in Great Britain. The comtesse d'Artois lived the last twelve years of her life in Graz, Austria, where she died at the age of forty-nine. Nineteen years later, her husband would ascend the throne as Charles X, though he only lasted a disastrous six years before being forced, once again, into exile.

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1777.

Decidedly more charming than his state portrait of the Queen, though no less insipid and ill-drawn than any of his other work, this gouache was painted as a memento of his sittings for that painting. The Queen is seen in her state bedroom - somehow shrunken down by the artist - wearing her wrapper, and seated at her beloved harp. She is surrounded by friends and attendants, and appears to be in the midst of her toilette. The artist leans out of frame at right; the canvas he works at is clearly the state portrait though, with "artistic license", the format is oval here, rather than the rectangular of the finished piece.

L'Homme en violet - portraits of the comte d'Angiviller

By Jean-Baptiste Greuze, circa 1763.

Charles-Claude Flahaut de la Billaderie, comte d'Angiviller (24 January 1730, Saint-Remy-en-l'Eau - 11 December 1809, Altona), director of the Bâtiments du roi under Louis XVI.  Having had a successful military career during the reign of Louis XV, rising to the rank of Field Marshal, he also later found himself in charge of the household of the dauphin’s sons. During his tenure he developed a close relationship with the young duc de Berry, the future Louis XVI who, after his accession in 1774, appointed d'Angiviller directeur général des Bâtiments, Arts, Jardins et Manufactures de France, a position perhaps best described as a kind of general and powerful minister of fine arts. As a personal friend of the king, he had great resources at his disposal - at least at the beginning of the reign, before the economic situation in France became so desperate - and throughout his career he displayed impressive energy and discernment. He was a great supporter of the Neoclassical movement, approved countless important artistic commissions, and it had been one of his most ambitious project to transform the Grand Galerie of the Louvre into Europe's most important art museum; the Revolution intervened, and the revolutionary government would assume all the credit when the Musée du Louvre opened in 1793. Two years before, though, falsely accused of squandering public funds - perhaps more damning would be his aristocratic title and his friendship with the king - he had fled France. He died in Germany at the age of seventy-nine.

Three details of the above.

Miniature by Jean-Baptiste Weyler, 1779.

 Another version of the miniature by Jean-Baptiste Weyler, set in a box by François Delanoy, 1779.

By Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, circa 1779.

The same.

A sketch for the portrait by Duplessis.

Another version of the portrait by Duplessis.

The duc de Richelieu, by Jean-Marc Nattier, circa 1732

Behind the duc are arrayed the robes and accoutrements of the Order of the Saint-Esprit, the senior chivalric order of royal France.

Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (13 March 1696, Paris – 8 August 1788, Paris), French soldier and diplomat, he participated in three major wars, eventually rising to the rank of Marshal of France, and was for a time French ambassador to the Imperial court in Vienna. A godson of Louis XIV, he was a close friend of Louis XV. His favor at court waned when he opposed the marquise de Pompadour, and was restored at her death and the rise of du Barry. But his intriguing nature and very unsavory reputation made him far from welcome at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. For he is best known, then and now, for his rampant, indiscreet womanizing. Married three times - his final marriage was consecrated when he was eighty-four - and his extramarital conquests were reckless and innumerable; it is said that the famous character Valmont in Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses was based on the duc de Richelieu. Despite years spent in battle and in amatory excess, he managed to survive to the extraordinary age - especially for the time - of ninety-two.

A copy after Nattier, circa 1732-42.

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Jean-Marc Nattier (17 March 1685, Paris – 7 November 1766, Paris), French painter, certainly the most important court portraitist of the eighteenth century. The child of two artists, he enrolled in the Royal Academy in 1703, with aspirations of becoming a history painter. But he found portraiture to be much more lucrative, and was successful in his chosen career from an early age. He painted numerous portraits of the French Royal family - especially the daughters of Louis XV - and the aristocracy gathered at Versailles. His style is immediately recognizable. Cool, muted. And with a particular kind of calm, even when portraying the floating, fluttering drapery of his female subjects, got up as nymphs and goddesses, one of his most characteristic devices.

The duchesse d'Angoulême, by Alexandre-François Caminade, 1827.

It is evident from damage to the bottom and sides and, especially, the top, that the painting was at some point placed in a much smaller frame.

Marie Thérèse Charlotte of France (19 December 1778, chateau de Versailles – 19 October 1851, Frohsdorf, Austria), eldest child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, later duchesse d'Angoulême. She was the only one of her immediate family to survive the Revolution. After several years in prison - after the executions of both her parents, her beloved aunt Élisabeth, and the death by neglect of her younger brother, Louis-Charles - on 18 December 1795, the day before her seventeenth birthday, she was exchanged for a political prisoner being held in Austria, and sent to her mother's family in Vienna.  She was unhappy there - she knew no one - and later joined her uncle, the future Louis XVIII, in exile in Courland. Since he had no heir, himself, he convinced her to marry her first cousin, the duc d'Angoulême, son of her other surviving uncle, the future Charles X. The duc was a shy, backward young man, and the marriage, arranged for purely dynastic reasons, proved childless.

A detail of the unrestored painting.  I may be projecting, but her eyes seem incredibly sad....

The royal family moved to England for several years, and at the fall of Napoléon in 1814, they returned to France where the monarchy was restored. Their triumph was short-lived. The following year Napoléon escaped his exile in Elba and began raising an army in the period that would later be known as the One Hundred Days, and Louis XVIII was forced to flee the country. But the duchesse d'Angoulême, who was in Bordeaux at the time, rallied the local troops. They agreed to defend her, and she refused to leave Bordeaux even after Napoléon ordered her arrest. Finally, believing her cause lost, and wanting to avoid senseless bloodshed, she agreed to leave France. Her personal bravery caused Napoléon to famously declare that she was the "only man in her family."

Like with most important royal commissions, reductions and variants of the painting were produced.

After Waterloo and Napoléon's final defeat, Louis XVIII once again returned as king of France. Since neither of her uncles' wives were still living, the duchesse d'Angoulême was considered the first lady of the Bourbon Restoration, and during the reign of Charles X, as her husband was the heir to the throne, she was addressed as Madame la Dauphine. The return to France had been very traumatic for her.  After her experiences during the Revolution, she probably suffered from what we would now label PTSD.  Still, she managed to fulfill all her royal duties with a very dignified and rigidly correct manner, though she was compared unfavorably to her famously graceful and charming mother; the fickle French somehow failed to notice the cruel irony of their criticisms.

The policies of Charles X were increasing unpopular, and in 1830, after the three day "July Revolution", what remained of the royal family once again went into exile, first to Edinburgh, then to Prague. In 1844, after the deaths of her uncle and husband, she went to live at Schloss Frohsdorf, a castle just outside of Vienna. The son and daughter of her husband's late brother - with whom she was very close, and who were the last of the legitimate royal line - came to live with her. She died a few years later, at the age of seventy-two.

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Alexandre-François Caminade (14 December 1783, Paris – 27 May 1862, Paris), French painter, known for his portraits and religious subjects.  He was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1833.

The second dauphin

The dauphin Louis-Charles, by Louis-Pierre Deseine, patinated plaster, 1790.

Louis-Charles de France (March 27, 1785, Versailles – June 8, 1795, Paris), duc de Normandie, dauphin of France after 1789, known by royalists after 1793 as Louis XVII. Second son and third child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

His story, after the beginning of the Revolution, is well enough known: his family's forced removal in October of 1789 from Versailles to the palais des Tuileries in Paris; the relatively peaceful three years they spent there; their ill-fated escape attempt in 1791, which ended in capture at Varennes, followed by the nightmarish return to Paris; the bloody storming of the Tuileries the next year, when the family barely escaped slaughter, only to then be interned in the medieval tower of the temple, where their living conditions steadily worsened. The remaining family group included his parents, his sister, Marie-Thérèse, and his father's sister, Madame Élisabeth. In December of 1792, Louis XVI was separated from his family and tried for treason. At his execution on January 21, 1793, his seven year old son became the titular king of France and Navarre.

A healthy, happy, affectionate child, he had always been the center of attention in the family - he was particularly doted on by his mother - so everyone was traumatized when, five months after the death of his father, he was separated from his mother, sister, and aunt, and removed to another floor of the Temple, where he was put into the care of the cobbler Simon and his wife for some months. He was treated roughly, and every attempt was made to turn him into a good little "citizen". Historians have argued over the severity of his living conditions during the last two years of his life, whether he was beaten and terrorized, left near starvation in his own filth, but most agree that he endured severe neglect. Other than a handful of brief visits by officials who observed and tried to question him, he lived in solitary confinement. (Before Marie Antoinette's trial in October of 1793, he had been forced to sign charges of molestation against his mother; several accounts give that he refused to speak after this point.)  In May of 1795, the child fell seriously ill, but it was several days before a doctor was called.  He died alone on June 8.  From his autopsy, the doctor concluded that his death was a result of a long standing tubercular infection of the cervical lymph nodes, what was known at the time as scrofula.  (He probably had a predisposition to tubercular conditions; previously, his elder brother and infant sister both died from tubercular illnesses.)  The doctor also commented that the body of the ten year old boy was covered with old scars that appeared to be the result of beatings.  Still, there remains much controversy as to the circumstances of his death - or his disappearance, as some claim - and in the decades after his death, there were many who claimed to be the lost prince, some of whom were taken quite seriously.

As was the tradition with royalty, at his death his heart had been removed and preserved.  For the next two hundred and five years it was kept as a relic; its peregrinations, in themselves, are quite the tale.  In 2000, DNA tests concluded that the preserved heart was indeed that of Louis-Charles, and in 2004, on the two hundred and ninth anniversary of his death, it was interred, joining the remains of his parents, at the basilica of Saint-Denis, the traditional burial place of French kings.

The version in marble, commissioned by the queen, was mutilated during the storming of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792;
later restored, it is now in at Versailles.

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Louis-Pierre Deseine (July 20, 1749, Paris – October 11,1822, Paris), French sculptor best known for his portrait busts. A student of Edme Dumont and, later, Augustin Pajou, he was awarded the prix de Rome in 1780. Sculptor to the prince de Condé, he remained loyal to the Bourbons during the revolution and under the Empire.

The First Dauphin

(A detail of the below painting.)

Louis-Joseph de France (Louis Joseph Xavier François; October 22, 1781, Château de Versailles – June 4, 1789, Château de Meudon), is always referred to in history books as the "first dauphin", because he died at the age of seven and it was then his younger brother who suffered during the Revolution, who was separated from his family and died of neglect, and who is known to very observant royalists as Louis XVII, though of course he never reigned.

Marie Antoinette and her children, by Vigée Le Brun, 1787.  The queen's elder daughter, Marie Thérèse, stands beside her mother, while
Marie Antoinette holds her younger son, Louis-Charles, on her lap.  The dauphin stands beside the cradle of his younger sister, Sophie,
who died at the age of eleven months - to the great sorrow of her parents - and was subsequently painted out of the large canvas.

Louis-Joseph was the second child and first male heir to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  Through their youth and ignorance, the king and queen had not managed to conceive until eight years into their marriage; the birth of a son, three years later, was cause for much joy.  Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were unusual for their time and their rank, in that they were very close, very bonded with all of their children; with the high rate of infant and child mortality, it is understandable that not everyone did the same.

The dauphin Louis-Joseph, by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, circa 1785.

At the age of three, the dauphin first began to show signs of ill health: high fevers which were in fact the early signs of tuberculosis of the spine.  From then on, he spent periods of time away from Versailles, it being believed that a better air quality would have restorative powers.  But his condition continued to worsen.  He developed a pronounced curvature of the spine which made it difficult for him to walk; he was made to wear corsets en fer - iron corsets - in an attempt to check the deformity.  By all accounts, he was an extremely intelligent child, and preternaturally wise.  He seemed to recognize as well as anyone, that he wouldn't survive.

The dauphin and his sister, Marie Thérèse, by Vigée Le Brun, 1784.

His death came in the midst of the meeting of the Estates-General in 1789, a political debacle for the regime, and the event that began the course of the French Revolution.  Many historians have theorized that the inability of the child's distraught parents to guide or weather events had much to do with the distraction of the grief they felt over the death of their little boy.

Marie Antoinette and her first two children in the park at Trianon, by Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, 1785.

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Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, see here.

Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, or Gautier d'Agoty (1740, Paris - 1786, Paris), French portraitist, from a family of painters.  He is generally considered a quite inferior artist, but the queen appointed him her personal artist and he painted her several times, including the first major state portrait after her husband came to the throne.  He also made portraits of her sisters-in-law, the comtesse de Provence and the comtesse d'Artois.

Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller  (February 18, 1751, Stockholm - October 5, 1811, Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania), Swedish painter.  He moved to Paris in 1772 to study under his cousin Alexander Roslin and French painter the Joseph-Marie Vien.  Though his portraits of the queen were generally thought to be unflattering, she was pleased with them and commissioned more work from him.  He emigrated to the United States in 1794, where he continued his work, which eventually included several portraits of George Washington.