A Closer Look at the Empress Eugénie

A charming portrait of the deposed wife of Napoleon III turns up a mile from my home.

A couple of days ago I posted a report about the Louvre Robbed, Crown Jewels Stolen that I illustrated with an image of a charming portrait by the German painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter that he completed in 1853.

The Empress was deposed in 1870 after her husband, Napoleon III, capitulated to Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War. Upon hearing of her husband’s surrender, she said:

No! An emperor does not capitulate! He is dead!...They are trying to hide it from me. Why didn’t he kill himself! Doesn’t he know he has dishonored himself?

With the help of the American dentist, Thomas W. Evans, she fled Paris and made her way to England. The Empress was famous for her extraordinary jewel collection, some of which wound up in the Louvre and was stolen last Sunday.

Eugénie de Montijo was born in Grenada, Spain in 1826 and died in 1920 in Madrid. During her long life she witnessed a vast tableau of events and developments, and was apparently instrumental in goading her husband to seek war against Prussia instead of averting it.

One of many things that intrigued me was her portrait by Winterhalter, the most famous society portraitist of his day. A bit of research indicated that several copies of the picture were made in Winterhalter’s atelier by the painter Pierre-Désiré Guillemet.

I found two differing accounts of what happened to the original. One story has it that “the original was kept in the Tuileries Palace and was probably lost during the fire of 1871.”

Another account is that Winterhalter’s portraits of Eugénie and Napoleon III were sent to the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico and displayed at the Chapultepec Castle alongside portraits of the Mexican imperial couple. After Maximilian was executed by firing squad in 1867, the portraits landed in the collection of a prominent Mexican family in whose possession they remained till this year.

The differing stories made me wonder about the true fate of the original portrait. About an hour after I posted my report on the Louvre robbery, an old friend in Dallas sent me an invitation to view the painting, which her husband had recently acquired when an estate in Mexico put it on consignment at a major gallery in the United States.