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Portrait of Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, later King of the French
Richard Cosway (British, 1742–1821)
1804
- Medium
- watercolor on ivory in a gold locket frame
- Classification
- Portrait Miniature
- Dimensions
- Framed: 7.5 x 6.6 cm (2 15/16 x 2 5/8 in.); Unframed: 6.3 x 5.4 cm (2 1/2 x 2 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- England, early 19th Century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- The Edward B. Greene Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Louis-Philippe (1773–1850, king of the French 1830–48) was the son of Louis-Philippe Joseph, duc d’Orléans, who was known as Philippe-Egalité during the French Revolution. The Orléans family was a branch of the House of Bourbon. This work was painted while Louis-Philippe was in exile and living in England from 1800 until 1815, when Napoleon abdicated. He finally succeeded Charles X as king of France in 1830. During the February Revolution of 1848, Louis-Philippe was again forced into exile in England where he died two years later. Richard Cosway had painted Louis-Philippe (as well as his siblings and father) when the family was in England immediately following the outbreak of revolution in 1789. Louis-Philippe would have been thirty-one years old when this work was executed. He wears the Order of the Holy Spirit, a chivalric order of the French monarchy, which can be distinguished by its white dove surrounded by green flames at the center of a Maltese cross, with fleur-de-lis between the arms of the cross. Instead of the brilliant turquoise and white cloud background traditionally associated with Cosway, this miniature has the more restrained, gray, hatched background that…
