Marie-Victoire Lemoine

Marie-Victoire Lemoine
French, 1754-1820
Madame Leclerc, nee Pauline Bonaparte, circa 1798-99
Signed M. Vic. Lemoine on the pilaster (lr)
Oil on canvas
77 x 54 1/8 inches (195.6 x 137.5 cm)

Provenance:
Apparently given by the sitter to her brother, Joseph Bonaparte
Joseph Bonaparte, Comte de Survilliers, Bordentown, NJ
Peter Gassner
By descent in the family to Peter Gassner's great-granddaughter, Mrs. Theodore F. Humphrey, and to the present owner.
Private collection, Washington, DC

Exhibited:
Paris, Salon, an VII (1799), no. 208
New York, Wildenstein Galleries, The Winds of Revolution, catalogue by Joseph Baillio, Nov. 14-Dec. 28, 1989, no. 102

Literature:
Joseph Baillio, The Winds of Revolution, exhibition catalogue (New York, 1989), p. 190, no. 102, illus.

Marie-Victoire Lemoine, one of a family of artists, lived her professional life at the center of the French art world, specializing in portraits and genre subjects. This lovely portrait by her of Pauline Bonaparte, younger sister of Napoleon I, was submitted anonymously to the Paris Salon of 1799 (Revolutionary year VII), where it was described as "Une jeune femme appuyee sur le bord d 'une croisee." (A Young Woman Leaning on the Edge of a Window).
Pauline Bonaparte (1780-1825) was married at 17 to the French general Charles Leclerc in 1797. This likeness of her was probably painted the following year, not long after the birth of her son.
In 1801 Pauline accompanied her husband on a military expedition to Haiti, where he died of yellow fever a year later. In 1803 Pauline married the Roman Prince Camillo Borghese, and thereafter lived as an Italian noblewoman. Notorious for her dissolute life, in later years she lived apart from Prince Borghese in the Villa Paolina in Rome.

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