En famille - three family groups

In his apartments at the Tuileries, Louis XVIII receives his nephew the duc d'Angoulême, victorious commander-in-chief of the Pyrenees Army. Standing beside the duc is his wife, "Madame Royale", Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, duchesse d'Angoulême; only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, she had been married off to her first cousin while in exile in 1799. Behind the king is the comte d'Artois, the future Charles X, who holds in his arms his grandson, Henri-Charles-Ferdinand-Marie-Dieudonné d'Artois, duc de Bordeaux. The child was the only son - born posthumously - of the duc de Berry who had been assassinated in 1820. His widow, Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, duchesse de Berry, stands beside her first surviving child, Louise-Marie-Thérèse d'Artois.

Louis XVIII recevant le duc d'Angoulême à son retour de la campagne d'Espagne (Louis XVIII receiving 

the duc d’Angoulême on his return from the campaign of Spain), by Antoine-Jean-Baptiste Thomas, 1823.

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За чайным столом (At the Tea Table), by Alexei Voloskov, 1851.

This group-portrait-as-conversation-piece was painted at the estate of Grigori Stepanovich Tarnovsky, Kachanivka/Kachanovka, Chernihiv Oblast, the Ukraine. In a room decorated with Gothic style motifs, Voloskov portrayed the owner of the estate seated at the table on the left. Leaning on the back of his chair, stands his brother (?)Vasili Tarnovsky, a prominent public figure on the peasant question, while seated across the table from him is his wife Lyudmila Vladimirovna. The girl in the white dress is Vasili's daughter, Yulia Vasilievna.

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Retrato da Família do 1.º Visconde de Santarém (Portrait of the Family of the 1st Viscount of Santarém), by Domingos Antonio Sequeira, 1816.

João Diogo de Barros Leitão Carvalhosa, the 1st Viscount of Santarém, is portrayed here with his second wife, their five children, and his younger brother, D. António Roberto, archbishop of Adrianopolis. The portrait hanging over the mantlepiece depicts his first-born son - from his first marriage - with his aunt and uncle, the Viscounts of Vila Nova da Rainha, sister and brother-in-law, respectively, of the Viscount of Santarém. The statuette on the table represents King João VI, who ascended the throne of Portugal in March 1816.

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.)

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.