Sitting rooms in Berlin, by Johann Erdmann Hummel, circa 1820

I find these two charming images so interesting.  Was the first a sketch for the second?  There are so many similarities, but so many differences; is it the same room or a different one?

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Johann Erdmann Hummel (11 September 1769, Kassel — 26 October 1852, Berlin), German painter.  He studied at the Kunsthochschule Kassel from 1780 to 1792, and from 1792 to 1799 he lived in Rome.  After that he returned briefly to Kassel before settling permanently in Berlin.  He worked as an illustrator and occasionally painted portraits, and in 1809 he became a professor at the Akademie der Künste, teaching courses on perspective, optics, and architecture.

Mercury About to Behead Argus, by Ubaldo Gandolfi, circa 1770-1775

Ubaldo Gandolfi (1728, San Matteo della Decima –1781, Ravenna), Italian painter of the late Baroque period, active mainly in and near Bologna. He was from a large family of artists. His sons, his bothers, his nephews and niece were all artists and, together, they are considered the last great representatives of the grandiloquent Bolognese school.

The great Carrousel of Louis XIV, 1662

By the seventeenth century, the medieval tournament had degenerated into the carrousel - a kind of equestrian display - a lavish pageant commemorating a memorable event. They were usually based on an allegorical theme, and the participants, often outrageously costumed, would perform a sequence of processions and equestrian figures to musical accompaniment, and participate in the relatively harmless sport of tilting at a ring.

View of the "Carrousel" facing the Palais des Tuileries.

The most famous carrousel was held in Paris on the fifth and sixth of June, 1662, to celebrate the birth of the dauphin, the first son and heir to the then twenty-five year old King Louis XIV. The pageant played out on a large square arena that had been specially created between the (now lost) Tuileries Palace and the Louvre. (To this day, the area carries the name of the Place du Carrousel.) Surrounded by fifteen thousand spectators, 1,297 participants - 655 of them on horseback - went through their carefully choreographed paces.

"Turkish" trumpeter and drummer.

View of the pageant facing the Louvre; the clutter of buildings obscuring the view of the palace was later cleared away.

"Roman" pages.

Another view facing the Tuileries.  (The central pavilion of the palace, seems to have been "lost" in the fold of the book.)

"American" drummer and trumpeter.

The revelers were divided into five groups: Le Quadrille persan, commanded by the king's brother; Le Quadrille des Turcs, led by the prince de Condé; Le Quadrille des Indiens, headed by the duc d'Enghien; leading Le Quadrille des Américains was the duc de Guise...

"Monsieur" - the duc d'Orléans - the brother of the king.

The prince de Condé.

The duc de Guise.

... and, most importantly, Le Quadrille des Romains, which was led by the king, himself. Louis XIV, at the height of his youthful powers, his horse's caparison reportedly enlivened with diamonds, was described by a contemporary:  "Dressed like a Roman in a long coat embroidered with silver and gold... on his head a silver helmet covered with gold leaf... from which there rises a crest of ostrich plumes dyed red..."

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One hundred and forty-four years later, on this same spot, Napoléon built the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, intended as a grand entry to the Palais des Tuileries.  The palace has disappeared but the arch remains, positioned between the long wings of the Louvre; from it one can see, along the long axis of the Tuileries gardens and the Champs-Élysées, the more famous Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile.  The arch in the Place du Carrousel is one of the many sublime structures of central Paris, but very few know the reason for its very particular name.

The arch was designed by Percier and Fontaine, and modeled on the Arch of Constantine in Rome. 

And to conclude on an appropriately equine note, the quadriga that crowns the arch originally incorporated the famous horses of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, which Napoléon had captured in 1797.  In 1815, after Waterloo and the Bourbon Restoration, the French rightfully ceded the horses, which were immediately packed off, back to Venice.  It wasn't until thirteen years later that the ensemble was replaced by a quadriga sculpted by Baron François Joseph Bosio, depicting Peace riding in a triumphal chariot led by gilded Victories.

Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna

Portrait by Franz Winterhalter, 1859.

Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna of Russia (8 July 1830, Altenburg – 6 July 1911, Saint Petersburg), born Princess Alexandra Friederike Henriette of Saxe-Altenburg, wife of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich of Russia.

Copy after a portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler, circa late-1840s.

She was the fifth of six children - all daughters - of Joseph, Duke of Saxe-Altenburg and his wife Amalia, Duchess of Württemberg. She met the Grand Duke in 1846 and they became engaged but, because of their youth, were made to wait two years before marrying. The couple had very different temperaments - he was intellectual and liberal, she was conservative - but they both shared a great love of music; a year after their marriage, they came into possession of the palace of Pavlovsk, and they sponsored public performances at the nearby concert hall that attracted great musicians and conductors from all over Europe. They had six children, most notably Olga, who became Queen of the Hellenes, and Konstantin, who was a noted poet and playwright who wrote under the name "K. R." Alexandra was considered a great beauty in her youth, with luxuriant hair, a tall, graceful figure, always very fashionably dressed.

Portrait by Friedrich Kaulbach, 1857.

Another version of the Winterhalter portrait, circa 1859.

Circa mid-1860s.

After twenty years of marriage, perhaps a result of the couple's basic incompatibility and/or a "midlife crisis", Grand Duke Konstantin embarked on a relationship with Anna Vasilyevna Kuznetsova, a young dancer from the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. She eventually bore him five children, and he set her up in a large, well-appointed dacha on the Pavlovsk estate, thereby placing his second family in close proximity to his first. Society and the court was scandalized, and they sided with the wronged wife. She suffered further indignity when their eldest child, the unstable and dissipated twenty-four year old Nikolai, stole valuable diamonds from his mother. He was convicted, declared mentally unfit, and banished for life to Central Asia. Then, in 1879, her youngest child, seventeen year old Vyacheslav, died from a brain hemorrhage.

With her daughter, Olga Queen of the Hellenes, and Olga's daughters, Alexandra and Marie, circa 1887.

Ten years later, during the wedding festivities of the couple's granddaughter, Princess Alexandra of Greece, Grand Duke Konstantin suffered a stroke. Two months later, he survived a second stroke which left him unable to walk or speak. For the remaining three years of his life, he lived with his wife at Pavlovsk, where he was confined to a bath chair and - to his great frustration - was under her control. She would not allow him contact with his mistress or illegitimate offspring, but at his death in 1892, she allowed Anna to come and pray at his bedside.

Seated, center left, at Nicholas II's coronation, 1896.

For the remaining nineteen years of Alexandra's life, she was the stately, white-haired grande dame of the family; she was particularly impressive at the coronation of Nicholas II, resplendent in a cloth-of-silver and ermine gown, covered in massive jewels.  She, herself, suffered a stroke in 1903, and from then on remained at home in the Marble Palace in St. Petersburg, where she died in 1911, two days before her eighty-first birthday.

"Aunt Sanny", as she was known in the family, in her later years.

Constantin Hansen, Gottlieb Bindesbøll, and Danish artists in Rome

A Company of Danish Artists in Rome. (In his red fez, the architect Bindesbøll lolls in the foreground.)

Carl Christian Constantin Hansen (3 November 1804, Rome – 29 March 1880, Copenhagen), one of the artists associated with the Golden Age of Danish Painting. The son of a painter, he studied under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. In 1835 he received a stipend to travel abroad for three years; he eventually spent eight years in Italy. While there, he traveled with several other Danish artists, and in 1837 the Copenhagen Art Union (Kunstforening) commissioned a painting from Hansen that commemorated the friendship of these Danish artists abroad. The painting was entitled "A Company of Danish Artists in Rome" (Et selskab af danske kunstnere i Rom), and portrayed the artist with his fellow painters Martinus Rørbye, Wilhelm Marstrand, Albert Küchler, Ditlev Blunck, Jørgen Sonne, and the architect Gottlieb Bindesbøll.

Apparently, Albert Küchler - the middle of the three men standing in the window -
painted a sketch of Hansen, so that he could use it to include himself in the group.

(Expand to view a larger size.)

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Three years later Hansen painted a portrait of his friend Bindesbøll.

Michael Gottlieb Birckner Bindesbøll (5 September 1800, Ledøje – 14 July 1856, Frederiksberg), Danish architect active during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. He is most remembered for his design of the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, and was a key figure in the stylistic shift in Danish architecture from late classicism to Historicism.

David and Goliath, two contrasting views of the young hero by Guido Reni

The vigorous and very boyish looking David finishing off the stunned giant...

... and the rather bored, rather effeminate post-victory celebrity.

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.

Jean Harlow and Robert Taylor, photographs by Hurrell, 1937

These portraits were taken as publicity for "Personal Property", Harlow's last completed film; she died during the making of her next film, "Saratoga", on June 7, 1937, at the age of twenty-six.

From the Art Academy's Plaster Cast Collection, by Julius Exner, 1843

 This was painted when the artist was eighteen years old, and exhibited the following year.

(Johan) Julius Exner, (30 November 1825, Copenhagen - 15 November 1910, Copenhagen), important Danish genre painter.

Two portraits of Philip IV, by Gaspar de Crayer, circa late 1620s

Philip IV of Spain (8 April 1605, Valladolid – 17 September 1665, Madrid), King of Spain and of Portugal, as Philip III. He was the eldest son of Philip III and his wife, Margaret of Austria. In 1615, he was married to Elisabeth of France; the bride was thirteen, the groom ten. The union wasn't entirely congenial, but it produced seven children - though only one son, whose death at the age of sixteen greatly distressed his father. Elisabeth died in 1644, and two years later he remarried. His second wife, Mariana of Austria - a niece; the Habsburgs were, famously, a genetic mess - bore him five children. Only two of them survived childhood, and the health of his heir, the future Charles II - who would be the last Habsburg king of Spain - was always uncertain.

Notably stiff in public, with a strong sense of his royal dignity, it appears Philip displayed a warmer personality in private. As a ruler, he is considered to have lacked confidence and decisiveness, and depended too much on the opinion of others. This may have been a result of the lingering influence of Count Olivares, who was Philip's close adviser when he ascended the throne at the age of sixteen, and remained his very powerful and domineering chief minister for the next twenty-two years.

Under Philip's reign, Spain underwent a political and military decline; his ineffective leadership has often been held to be the cause of these developments but, in reality, the causes were systemic. Philip is most remembered today for his great passion for collecting art - he had acquired some four thousand paintings by the time of his death. Most famously he was the patron of Diego Velázquez, who was appointed court painter in 1624, and held that title for the remaining thirty-six years of his life.

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Gaspar de Crayer (18 November 1582, Antwerp - 27 January 1669, Ghent), Flemish painter. A contemporary of Rubens - the two careers had many parallels - he is best known for his numerous altarpieces, which can be found in churches throughout Europe.

The King is wearing the same armor in both paintings, and the background drapery is almost identical.