Lot 121: Jean Auguste Edouard Lienard (French, 1779-1848) Empress Eugénie (1826-1920), wearing white dress with floral corsage and lavender shawl, seated on a gilded chair, hair dressed with rose buds

Empress Eugénie (1826-1920), wearing white dress with floral corsage and lavender shawl, seated on a gilded chair, hair dressed with rose buds.
Painted on porcelain, signed on the obverse, J. Lienard., gold frame.
Oval, 57mm (2 1/4in) high

The present lot is painted after a full-length portrait dated 1894, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter and is in the Collection of Christopher Forbes.

Eugénie de Montijo was born in Granada to Don Cipriano de Palafox y Portocarrero, (1785-1839) and María Manuela Enriqueta Kirkpatrick de Closbourn y de Grevigné (1794–1879), a daughter of the Scots-born William Kirkpatrick of Closbourn (1764-1837) who became U.S. Consul to Málaga.

She was educated in Paris, at the convent of the Sacré Cœur and met Prince Louis Napoléon, president of the Second Republic at a ball held at the Elysée Palace. They were married on the 30 January 1853. Three years later, the Empress gave birth to their only child, Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, the Prince Impérial.

Napoléon often consulted Eugénie on important matters of State and she acted as Regent during his absences in 1859, 1865 and 1870. The Empress was a loyal and firm defender of papal temporal powers in Italy for which she was loathed and mercilessly slandered by anti-clerics in France. She was also widely blamed for the fiasco of the French intervention in Mexico and the death of Emperor Maximilian I. Critics claimed that the Empress encouraged French involvement purely as a means of distracting herself from her husband's affairs.

The Empress did have a positive impact on ladies' fashions however and European trends often followed her lead. She patronized the legendary couturier, Charles Frederick Worth and her style and elegance are well documented in many paintings, particularly by her favourite portraitist, Franz Xaver Winterhalter.

Following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the Empress and her husband sought refuge in England, settling first in Chislehurst, Kent. After Napoleon III's death in 1873, followed by that of their son in 1879, she moved to Farnborough, Hampshire before finally retiring to her villa in Cape Martin.

The former Empress died in 1920 at the age of 94 in her native Spain. She is buried with her husband and son in the Imperial Crypt at St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough.