The King of Rome
Pierre Paul Prud'hon·1811
Historical Context
Prud'hon painted the King of Rome in 1811, the year of Napoleon's heir's birth, capturing the infant prince who was the fulfilment of Napoleon's dynastic ambitions. Napoleon François, named King of Rome at birth and later the subject of Victor Hugo's play and Edmond Rostand's L'Aiglon, had an extraordinarily charged existence: adored by his father, presented to France as the guarantee of imperial succession, separated from his parents after 1814, and dead of tuberculosis at twenty-one. Prud'hon's infant portrait — one of several made of the young prince — is thus freighted with historical irony that it could not anticipate. The Louvre holds the canvas as part of its comprehensive collection of Napoleonic portraiture, in which this image of imperial hope occupies a particularly poignant position given the subsequent collapse of the dynasty.
Technical Analysis
The infant portrait is a specialized challenge: the conventions of idealization applicable to adult subjects must be reconciled with the specific physiognomy of a particular child. Prud'hon's soft atmospheric modeling is naturally suited to the rounded forms and warm skin of infancy, and the painting achieves both personal likeness and the dynastic gravity appropriate to a prince.
Look Closer
- ◆Imperial symbols woven into or surrounding the infant's setting identify this as a dynastic portrait rather than a private family painting — the child represented as political future as well as personal joy.
- ◆The soft light falling on the infant's face conveys the warmth and protective love of Napoleonic paternal imagery rather than the cool, distant light of official portraiture.
- ◆The infant's unself-conscious natural movement — grasping, turning, or resting — introduces a note of unaffected life that no amount of dynastic framing can entirely contain.
- ◆The quality of Prud'hon's flesh modeling in this portrait achieves the particular luminosity of healthy infant skin — warm, slightly translucent — with greater accuracy than most of his adult portraits.
