Anne of Prussia, first love of Franz Joseph of Austria
Maria Anna Friederike of Prussia (1836-1918) was a princess of Prussia and Landgravine of Hesse-Kassel. She was the youngest daughter of Prince Charles of Prussia, and his wife, Princess Maria of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.
Being a beautiful young princess, she was the object of much attention at the Prussian court; in the winter of 1852, the young Franz Joseph I of Austria met her in Berlin and fell in love with her (Franz Joseph was the future husband of the much better known Sissi, Elizabeth of Bavaria).
He wished to declare his love to her and so his mother, Archduchess Sophia, wrote to Queen Elizabeth of Prussia telling her of the “joy which was shown to him as a floating dream, making an impression on his heart much stronger and deeper than I initially thought“.
In any case, Anna was already engaged at the time. Franz Joseph’s mother asked: “Is there any hope that this sad marriage, which they are imposing on the charming Anna and which leaves no prospect of happiness, could be prevented?”, but unfortunately her efforts were not crowned from success.
On May 26, 1853, Anna married Prince Frederick William of Hesse-Kassel at Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin.
Anna was the second wife of Frederick William, who had lost his beloved wife Alexandra Nikolaevna of Russia nine years earlier while she was giving birth to a son. Frederick William was never able to get over the loss, which occurred just a year after his first marriage, and it is believed that this was the reason his relationship with Anne of Prussia was polite, yet emotionally detached.
Anna, in addition to being beautiful, was also a very intelligent woman who presided over court salons where important artists and musicians gathered, including Johannes Brahms (who dedicated to her his splendid Quartet for piano and strings, op. 34), Clara Schumann, Anton Grigorevič Rubinštejn and Julius Stockhausen. She was herself a very talented and skilled pianist.
Let’s now go to discover the splendid, sophisticated and colorful portrait of the famous painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter, painted in 1858.
Of this portrait it was said: “It is difficult to believe that tulle can assume such floating shapes or that it can be painted with such a fluffy delicacy so that it seems to have a life of its own that wraps around the sitter.”
The young woman is depicted in a three-quarter portrait in a vertical oval format, with the Prussian Order of Louise on her left shoulder, she bents slightly forward, rests her forearms on the back of an armchair, her face is turned to the viewer, half profile, with one side noticeably shaded.
The strong coloration, deliberately used as a means of design, is certainly striking: the vibrant dark blue of the fur coat upholstery, the golden yellow of the armchair and the romantic pink silk of the dress are subtly distributed in quantity and concentration, as if they were in harmony with each other by means of an imaginary color table.
The nobility of pearls is everywhere, in the earrings, in the rounds of the necklace and around the wrist.
The unusual posture of the model, which Winterhalter used here for the first time in a portrait, is already known from a portrait of the Princess of Broglie painted by Ingres in 1853.
Winterhalter, however, ingeniously corrected the position of the arms, creating new visual axes that particularly emphasize the subject’s torso and contrast the exquisitely worked face and dense mass of brown hair with the extremely sophisticated loose construction formed by tulle and the billowing silk.
I don’t know about you but I’m picturing myself wrapped in this bubbly cloud of tulle …
