AN IVORY MINIATURE, JEAN BAPTISTE ISABEY, CIRCA 1800 | An ivory miniature, Jean Baptiste Isabey, circa 1800

oval, wearing a white dress and a pearl necklace, a lace veil partly covering her hair, stamped gilt-metal mount, rectangular black-lacquered wood frame MN 4123

Eugénie, Empress of the French (1826-1920);
Prince Victor Napoléon (1862-1926);
Prince Louis Napoléon (1914-1997)

Related literature

Laure Junot, Memoirs of the Duchess D’Abrantès, vol. 1, New York, 1832, p. 256.

Miniature: good condition, some dust and dirt around the edges. The glass has some humidity spots underneath and is beginning to show signs of disease (should be replaced).
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The sitter has been traditionally identified as Fanny de Beauharnais, née Marie Anne Françoise Mouchard (1737–1813), lady of letters and salonnière, aunt of Alexandre de Beauharnais and godmother to his daughter, Hortense. However, the features do not correspond with a captioned  portrait of her, used as the frontispiece of the first volume of Illustrations de Fables de Phèdre, published by P. Didot l’aîné in Paris in 1806. With some modifications - the change from a rectangular to an oval-shaped ground and the inclusion of a pearl necklace -  this miniature is a variant of a signed portrait by Jean Baptiste Isabey in the Wallace Collection, London (4.5 x 4.1 cm, inv. no. M228). Curiously, the Wallace Collection miniature also bore a traditional but spurious identification of the sitter: Letitzia Bonaparte.

The sitter may, perhaps, be more plausibly identified as Caroline Murat (1782–1839), youngest sister of Napoléon Bonaparte. The same open-mouthed half smile was captured by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun in a full length portrait of the her with her eldest daughter, Letizia, painted in 1807 (Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, inv. no. MV4712). This miniature, based on the style of costume and the artist’s technique, must have been painted around 1800, the year of the civil marriage of Caroline, then aged seventeen, to Joachim Murat. Isabey’s portrait has captured what Laure Junot, duchesse d’Abtantès, observed of her: ‘fresh as a rose: not to be compared, for the regular beauty of her features, to [Pauline Bonaparte], though more pleasing perhaps by the expression of her countenance and the brilliancy of her complexion’ (Junot, p. 256 ).