ATTRIBUTED TO DELPORTE FRERES, CIRCA 1805-1813

Elisa Baciocchi was the most powerful of the female Bonaparte siblings and the only one personally invested with political power. The eldest daughter of the Bonaparte family, on 18 March 1805 she was made an Imperial Highness and received the principality of Piombino with her husband receiving the principality of Lucca in the same year, a domain over which she alone wielded power. In 1809 she was made Grand Duchess of Tuscany, thus assuming one of Europe’s greatest cultural legacies. In the image of the Imperial court in Paris, Elisa undertook a programme of modernisation and improvement in Lucca, reforming the legal system, establishing a Banque Elisienne and most of all patronising the arts. With a particular focus on sculpture and works in marble, Elisa promoted the careers of numerous sculptors and artisans, among them Canova and Bartolini. In 1814 during the war of the Sixth Coalition, the allies forced Elisa to flee Lucca and in 1820 she died in exile near Cervignano. At her death Napoleon described her as ‘a woman of a masterly mind’.

The carving of this frame, particularly the scrolling foliate motif and the use of Napoleonic bees, bears striking similarities to a frame, also attributed to Delporte Frères, which houses a bust-length portrait of the Emperor Napoleon in ceremonial robes by François Gérard, now in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Ben Weider Collection, inv. 2008. 403).