686. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867),

French, Portrait of the Duke of Orléans,

Ferdinand-Philippe de Bourbon-Orléans, 1842.

Oil on canvas, 158 x 122 cm.

Musée du Louvre, Paris. Neoclassicism.

 

 

Born at Palermo on September 3, 1810, was the son of Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, afterward King of France, and Marie Amélie, princess of the Two Sicilies. Under the Restoration he bore the title of Duke of Chartres, and studied classics in Paris at the Collège Henri IV. At the outbreak of the Revolution, which in 1830 set his father on the throne, he was colonel of a regiment of Hussars. He then assumed the title of Duke of Orléans, and was sent by the King to Lyons to put down the formidable riots which had broken out there (1831), and then to the siege of Antwerp (1832). He was appointed lieutenant-general, and made several campaigns in Algeria. On his return to France he organised the battalions of light infantry known as the chasseurs d’Orléans. He died as a result of a carriage accident at Neuilly, near Paris, on the 13th of July, 1842.

The Duke of Orléans had married Helène Louise Elisabeth of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and had two sons by her, the Count of Paris and the Duke of Chartres. On the 24th of February 1848, after the abdication of Louis Philippe, the Duchess of Orléans went to the Chamber of Deputies assembled in the Palais Bourbon in the hope of having her eldest son proclaimed and of obtaining the regency; but the threatening attitude of the populace forced her to flee. She took refuge in England, and died at Richmond on May 18, 1858.