Estimate

25.000 - 30.000

Session 1

14 April 2021

Hammer Price

Description

Portrait of Empress Amelia of Beauharnais
Oil on canvas

81x64 cm

Category

Paintings

Additional Information

Portrait of D. Amélia Beauharnais Leuchtenberg, Empress of Brazil and wife of King D. Pedro IV of Portugal, and first Emperor of Brazil in half-body, turned three-quarters to the right, looking straight ahead, after a engraving by Jean-Baptiste Aubry-Lecomte (1787-1858) who is at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
Daughter of the then Viceroy of Italy, Eugénio de Beauharnais, and Princess Augusta Amélia, daughter of King Maximilian I of Bavaria, D. Amélia was the paternal granddaughter of Josephine de La Pagerie, wife of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
Educated in Munich, at the age of 17, she left to Rio de Janeiro, with the purpose of marrying D. Pedro I of Brazil, widower since 1826 of D. Leopoldina of Hasbsburgo, and to become the second Empress of Brazil.
The empress will accompany her husband and stepdaughter, the future Queen D. Maria II of Portugal, to Europe, where the couple, using only the title of Dukes of Bragança, will see their only daughter, Marie Amélie, born on the 1st of December of 1831.
Shortly afterwards, D. Pedro left for the Azores, and only rejoined his wife and daughters in 1833. With the death of D. Pedro in 1834, D. Amélia became a widow at the age of twenty-two, returned to Munich, and shortly afterwards returned definitively to Portugal.
In Lisbon, she lives between the Palácio das Janelas Verdes, place of the current National Museum of Ancient Art and the Royal Quinta de Caxias and dedicates his life to the poor and the sick, never losing contact with the stepchildren he left in Brazil, children of the D. Pedro's first marriage.
One of his most well-known portraits is the one found in the collection of the National Palace of Queluz in which the young Empress wears a dark blue velvet dress with a neckline starting from the shoulders while holding a medallion with the image of D. Pedro IV. Around her neck, she wears a pearl necklace with a pearl pendant in the shape of a drop, forming a set with pearl earrings similar to the one she wears in the painting by Friedrich Dürck that we found at the Soares dos Reis National Museum.
On the other hand, in this picture the empress wears a long necklace of pearls with two loops and earrings similar to the picture in the palace of Queluz.
Another peculiarity of this painting, which we bring up for auction, concerns the possession label that we see on the back of the canvas and that concerns to the last Queen of Portugal D. Amélia de Bragança (1865-1951).