Portrait of Empress Eugénie

This 1853 state portrait of Empress Eugenie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III during the Second French Empire, was painted in oil on canvas, measuring 240 by 155 centimeters, by the German court portraitist Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the same painter and format used for his companion portrait of the emperor. It shows the empress in state robes, wearing the ribbon of the Spanish Order of Queen Maria Luisa and pearls from the French Crown Jewels. As with the companion portrait of Napoleon III, the original was destroyed in the 1871 fire at the Tuileries Palace in Paris, and the image survives mainly through the roughly forty copies commissioned for French official buildings between 1855 and 1870. Two of Winterhalter's own preparatory studies for the portrait, discovered in private collections in Italy and Denmark, were sold at Christie's in October 2013. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/