Empress Eugénie of France
Franz Xaver Winterhalter was one of the most fashionable and stylish portraitists of the mid-19th century. His sensuous and softly romantic images were a great success, and he was commissioned to paint most of the crowned heads of Europe. The stylish image of flattering luxury and power made defining images of monarchs such as the 1842 portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
This portrait of Empress Eugénie of France (1826-1920) is a reduced copy by the artist of the original commissioned by the Empress in 1854. Eugénie was the daughter of a Spanish father, Cipriano de Palafox, 8th Count of Montijo and a Scottish mother, Maria Kirkpatrick. She became Empress in 1853 when she married Napoléon III (1808-1873). This portrait was painted shortly after their marriage.
Eugénie and her husband represented the end of the French monarchy. When the Second Empire was overthrown after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Empress and her husband took refuge in Kent, England in 1871. In 1880, she moved to Farnborough Hill in Hampshire, where she spent the rest of her life.
She visited the Russell-Cotes in 1881 where Merton recalled, ‘she also expressed a hope that my wife and I would pay Her Majesty a visit at Farnborough Hill’. She died aged 94 and is interred in the Imperial Crypt at St Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough, with her husband and their son, the Prince Impérial.
