Amélie Marguerite Kautz - Portrait Of The King Of Rome, Son Of Emperor Napoleon - Miniature

Amélie Marguerite Kautz (1796-1860), after Jean-Baptiste Isabey
Portrait of the King of Rome, son of Emperor Napoleon I
Vienna, May 1816

Watercolor and gouache on paper, with oval view.
14 x 11.5 cm unframed, 20 x 17 cm framed.
In an elegant gilt brass and black wood frame.

On the reverse, a 20th-century label states that this portrait was brought back from Schönbrunn by Madame Soufflot, a moving reminder of the Viennese sojourn of the King of Rome, exiled after the fall of the Empire.

The artist Amélie Marguerite Kautz, daughter of Frédéric Chrétien Kautz and Jeanne Françoise Fléchet, was a talented miniaturist. She produced several portraits after Isabey, whose style and finesse left their mark on First Empire painting. Married in 1835 to Comte de Lacépède, she left a discrete body of work, appreciated by lovers of court portraits.

This delicate portrait bears witness to Napoleonic iconography and the memory of the only son of Napoleon I and Marie-Louise, who became Duke of Reichstadt in Vienna, where he died prematurely in 1832.