Prince Henryk Lubomirski as a Genius of Fame

In autumn of 1785, Princess Isabella Lubomirska left her Polish homeland for a six-year journey through Europe – her oppositional stance towards King Stanislaw August Poniatowski had become too obvious. In November of 1786, she arrived in Paris, where she resided until the outbreak of the revolution at the Palais Royal, where her salon was a much-favoured rendezvous point for society. Among her followers was the young Prince Henryk Lubomirski (1777–1850), who belonged to the Kiev offshoot of the family line. The boy’s extraordinary beauty and the childlike and soulful expressiveness of his face, excited universal admiration and delight. It hardly seems surprising, then, that the wealthy princess – herself a prominent patroness and art collector – had portraits of the adored child painted again and again in Rome, Paris, and London. The most important of these was executed in Paris apparently in 1787 when the Princess commissioned the court painter of Queen Marie Antoinette to paint the child’s portrait for the unheard fee of 12,000 francs, intended to cause a sensation, and hence to be executed in the latest fashion à la grecque. In the January 24, 1788 issue of the Journal de Paris (no. 24, p. 109), a “M. Bordeaux” paid tribute to the painting in the form of a poem. According to Lavater, childish “innocence and naïveté” are mirrored in the well-proportioned face. Demonstrably, the boy holds aloft a myrtle and laurel wreath, symbol of triumphant innocence. With extraordinary refinement, subtle colouristic nuances are united with the lyrical expression of idealised, precocious facial features to produce a masterful example of the visual art of sentimental Neoclassicism. Not only the attributes refer to antiquity, but also the ancient sculpture which served the artist as an immediate model: the Crouching Venus. This Hellenistic sculpture from the third century BCE, the work of the artist Doidales, was well-represented in collections of antiquities, including many Roman copies, as well as through cameos and paste, and was widely disseminated in particular through copies in statuette form. The portrait of Henryk Lubomirski refers directly to the sculpture. Despite the painterly and colouristic charm, and despite the sentimental expression of the portrayed individual, the sculptural qualities of the ancient model are insistently present. The emphasis of the main view, the almost feminine physique, the kneeling pose of the Amor-prince, and the typical motif of movement, in combination with the closed contour line, tend to identify the work as a precise citation from antiquity. From the perspective of strict Neoclassicism, nudity was regarded as an attribute of the ideal style. Even Napoleon was immortalised (albeit not with his explicit approval) by Canova in an over-life-sized statue as a naked Roman emperor!When we recall the degree to which Princess Lubomirska revered Winckelmann, and at the same time her enthusiasm for Lavater and Rousseau, then the special significance of this child’s portrait becomes evident. All of the allegorical portraits of young prince – as Amor, Bacchus, Amphion, Serafim, and the Genius of Fame – commissioned by the Princess during her European trip testify both to her fondness for the child, as well as her conviction that his childlike beauty allows us to glimpse the distant echo of a higher, ideal nature that can be captured only by art. Hennig Bock | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019 (2021 updatet by Sarah Salomon)