Napoléon-François-Charles-Joseph Bonaparte

Lawrence's portrait of Napoleon's son — officially Franz, Duke of Reichstadt, known to Bonapartists as Napoleon II — was painted in Vienna around 1818-19 during the artist's European tour for the Waterloo Chamber commission. The young Napoleon was at this date six or seven years old, living under the custody of his Habsburg grandfather Emperor Francis I as part of the Austrian court's deliberate suppression of any future Bonapartist claim. His mother Marie Louise, Napoleon's second wife, had been given the Duchy of Parma by the Congress of Vienna and showed little interest in the son she had abandoned to the Austrian court. The child — referred to as l'Aiglon (the Eaglet) by French Romantics — was surrounded by political implication: the Austrian court worked systematically to erase his French identity and replace it with Austrian loyalty, while Bonapartist sympathizers across Europe projected onto him the hope of dynastic restoration. Lawrence's portrait captures the child's innocence with the warmth he brought to all his child subjects, but the Habsburg setting visible in the composition's grandeur imposes its own political meaning. The boy died of tuberculosis in 1832, aged twenty-one, extinguishing the direct Bonapartist line before its political potential could be tested.

Lawrence handles the delicate diplomatic nature of the subject with characteristic grace, portraying the child with tender sympathy while avoiding any suggestion of Napoleonic glamour. The boy's features — notably reminiscent of his father — are rendered with the warm, fresh tones Lawrence employed for his most appealing child portraits.