A very rare Sèvres biscuit bust of Napoleon's son, Napoléon-François-Charles-Joseph Bonaparte, the King of Rome, dated 1811

Footnotes

Provenance:
By family repute previously in the possession of Pauline Borghese (1780 – 1825), Napoléon's sister, and taken from Saint-Cloud by Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher , Fürst von Wahlstatt (1742-1819) after Waterloo;
From the collection of Marechal Blücher von Wahlstatt, Schloss Radun, Breslau, sold Sotheby Parke Bernet Monaco S.A., 4 December 1976, lot 9;
Purchased in the above sale

The only other known example of this rare bust, with its original pedestal, is in the collection of the châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau (inv. no. M.M.71.7.1). A plaster bust of the model by Rutxhiel is in the collection of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussel (object number 20022274).

Napoléon-François-Charles-Joseph Bonaparte (1811-1832), the son of Emperor Napoleon I and Empress Marie Louise, was Prince Imperial of France and the King of Rome from birth. He briefly became Emperor of the French as Napoleon II in 1814, but Napoleon I eventually renounced his and his descendants rights to the throne. On 23 April 1814 Marie Louise and her then three-year old son left France and went into exile in Austria, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was given the title Duke of Reichenstadt by Emperor Franz I of Austria, his maternal grandfather, and decided to follow a military career, which was hampered by a fear of a Bonaparte return to France by Europe's monarchies. He died of tuberculosis in 1832 at the age of 21.