Chantilly Castle reveals Louise d’Orléans, first queen of the Belgians and forgotten romantic

In order not to displease England, our King Louis-Philippe declined the crown of Belgium offered to his son Louis d’Orléans, Duke of Nemours, in 1831. On the other hand, when it came to giving a wife to Léopold de Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha, who became the first king of the Belgians, nothing stood in the way of the choice of a French princess. Failing to have Louis as king, the very young Belgium therefore had Louise as queen, second of the ten children of Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amélie of Bourbon-Siciles.

Princess of France, Queen of the Belgians

No big wedding at Notre-Dame unfortunately, nor even in a church, the bride and groom being of the Lutheran faith! The ceremony was therefore celebrated, by papal dispensation, in the chapel of the palace of Compiègne, hastily refurnished for the festivities. Louise d’Orléans (Palermo 1812-Ostend 1850) accepted with resigned courage this state marriage, a guarantee of peace in Europe. She learned to love her new homeland, she also learned to love her husband, “like a friend”…

Born in 1790, formerly “most handsome prince in Europe”widower of the Princess of Wales, Leopold I was not a partridge of the year. He could have been her father! Moreover, he posed himself as a rival to Louis-Philippe, who like him owed his crown to the revolutions of 1830. “These two authoritarian patriarchs [avaient] in fact the intention to extend through other marriages their dynastic network and their international political influence”, writes Grégoire Franconia in the exhibition catalog. Although kept away from state affairs, Louise therefore played the role of unofficial intermediary between the palaces of Laeken and the Tuileries. “Without being a woman of power, she [fut] undeniably a politician”concludes Franconia. For the rest, she carried out her new “job” as queen with determination, despite her lack of taste for public appearances. Despite the political upheavals – and a few hiccups at the start, because she was outspoken…

From 1833, the birth of his first child, Louis-Philippe said “Babochon” had won Louise the hearts of the Belgians. To commemorate the arrival of the heir to the throne, Leopold I^is commissioned from François-Joseph Navez, one of the most prominent painters in the kingdom, a Sleep of Jesus intended for his wife’s Catholic chapel. The death of the toddler a few months later gave this divine sleep a funereal tone. The Belgians cried with Louise. She gave birth to three other children, Léopold (future Léopold II), Philippe and Charlotte.

Watercolorist and collector

Like her brothers and sisters, Louise had received a quality education. Art was naturally part of it. Student of Ary Scheffer and Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the famous painter of roses, she had quite a talent as a watercolorist. Faithful to her good masters, she ordered her full-length portrait from Scheffer, with Brussels as a backdrop. As for Redouté, he was made a knight of the Order of Leopold.

For her dear sister Marie d’Orléans, a sculptor and collector who created a “Gothic cabinet” at the Tuileries, Louise set out in search of furniture and objects. She shared with her brother the Duke of Aumale a passion for ancient manuscripts. Thanks to him, she discovered the fabulous library of the Dukes of Burgundy, the core of the Royal Library of Belgium, whose catalog he wanted to receive. Far from equaling Aumale and his fabulous collections, Louise showed a certain taste for art. She collected fashion prints, lithographs and romantic drawings which she put together in albums.

She also played a discreet role as patron, although her involvement in the Belgian royal collection remains difficult to dissociate from that of her husband, the catalog tells us. With « le Léopich »as she referred to her husband in her French correspondence, she regularly visited the art salons of Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent, looking for works to buy. His letters to his mother provide critical, often amusing, even cowardly, accounts of these visits. She appreciated landscapes, animal painting, portraits.

With Leopold, she helped launch the career of Franz Xaver Winterhalter at the courts of Europe. For portraits intended for family and friends, she retained, on the advice of Queen Victoria, the services of the miniaturist William Charles Ross. The premature death of the “beloved queen” in 1850 inspired a painter she appreciated, Jean-Baptiste Van Eycken. He immortalized his last moments. At the request of the Ministry of the Interior, this pathetic work was not presented at the Salon, out of consideration for the royal family. In Laeken, Leopold I had Joseph Poelaert build a vast neo-Gothic church, a mausoleum of his “angel of kindness and tenderness”.