Angelica Kauffmann - Portrait of Ferdinand IV, King of Naples and Sicily, and His Family, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.
The Princely Collections not only own the sketch but also the modello for Angelika Kauffmann’s monumental painting of King Ferdinand IV of Sicily and Naples and His Family, which is now in the Museo di Capodimonte of Naples. The extraordinarily large finished painting, over four metres wide, hangs in Naples. The life-size figures we find here are those of the king, his consort, Queen Marie Karoline, a daughter of Maria Theresia, and six of her children. The royal family is posed against the background of a park landscape and is dressed accordingly. The bucolic ideal of a rural life and the ideas of the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau both inform this composition, which reflects the corresponding shift of taste among patrons. These no longer desired to have themselves recorded for posterity in the context of their palaces and other imposing residences. They wished to be shown, rather, under God’s open sky. The modello, a later version of the painting most closely resembling the finished composition, in fact includes the ‘ghost’ of a seventh child (this was the short-lived Prince Joseph, who died in 1783); although painted out, he nonetheless remains visible. By comparison with the finished composition, the sketch and the modello, both in the Princely Collections, are distinguished by their directness and liveliness, and it is through these qualities that they provide such a vivid image of the royal family.
[Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna - Oil on canvas, 72 x 100 cm]
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