The Sobieskis and Stuarts. Portrait of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, J. C. Armytage, 1859

engraved by J. C. Armytage, after Louis Tocqué (1748)
steel engraving on paper, 1859
private collection

Tocqué’s portrait shows Charles shortly after his 27th birthday, subsequent to his failed campaign to regain the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1745–1746. Although produced during a difficult period in Charles’ life, the portrait is not one of a defeated man, but of a young warrior full of confidence. Although the Jacobite forces were beaten at Culloden (1746), and he was forced to escape to France, Charles was still enormously popular with the citizens of Paris and a part of the French aristocracy. However, the support of his cousin King Louis XV was increasingly inhibited by the king’s ministers and imperatives of French foreign policy.

In 1747–1748, Charles began an affair with his maternal first cousin, Marie Louise de La Tour d’Auvergne (their Sobieska mothers were sisters). She was the wife of Jules Hercule de Rohan, Duke of Montbazon (whose portrait is displayed at this exhibition) and Charles gave Marie Louise the original of Tocqué’s portrait, but which has not survived. Their relationship produced a son, named Charles, who was born in January 1748 but died a few months later.
The original portrait was engraved in 1748 by Johan Georg Wille, and that engraving provided the basis for this one.