The piece of the month of December 2016
AN UNPUBLISHED PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT OF THE CARLIST PRETENDER CHARLES V
Ignacio Miguéliz Valcarlos
Museum of the University of Navarra
"Enclosed is a photograph of my grandfather and one of my grandmother, which I have had copied by Weeder's son from daguerreotypes (sic) taken in Vienna in 1853. They are the true portraits of the grandparents, which few possess". The writer is Alfonso Carlos de Borbón y Austria Este (1849-1936) in a letter sent on 21 August 1931 to Elio Elío y Magallón (1852-1938), Marquis of Vessolla and Count of Ayanz. The former was the son of John III (1822-1887) and Archduchess Maria Beatrix of Austria East (1824-1906), and younger brother of Charles VII. In 1872 he was appointed Commander General of Catalonia by his brother during the Second Carlist War (1872-1876), subsequently uniting the Catalan and Central armies under his command. He lived in exile in Austria throughout his life, devoting much of his efforts to the organisation of anti-double war leagues in various European countries. After the death without descendants of his nephew James III in 1931, he became the dynastic heir to the Carlist tradition at degree scrollas king, taking the name of Alfonso Carlos I. With his death in 1936, the first-born line of the Carlists, direct descendants of Don Carlos María Isidro, the pretender Charles V, was extinguished. The Marquis of Vessolla, one of the main figures of Carlism in Navarre, was the third son and first child of Fausto Elío y Mencos (1827-1901), Count of Ayanz and Marquis of Vessolla, and María Josefa Magallón y Campuzano (†1899), daughter of the Marquises of San Adrián. Don Elio took part in the Second Carlist War (1872-1876) as part of the headquarters of Alfonso de Borbón Dos Sicilias y Austria, Count of Caserta, and later took part in the campaign of Catalonia and in the campaign of the Centre as an officer teaching assistantof Don Alfonso Carlos. At the end of the war he became one of the most trusted men first of Charles VII and later of his brother Alfonso Carlos, with whom he was to become a close friend. After his time in the army he entered politics, being elected senator for Navarre in five terms of office.
As Don Alfonso Carlos indicates in his letter, and initials on the photographs, these images show the portraits of his grandparents, Don Carlos María Isidro, Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne under the name of Carlos V (1788-1855) and his second wife, the Infanta Maria Teresa de Braganza (1793-1874), Princess of Beira. They are both copies of photographs taken in 1853, which Don Alfonso Carlos had had copied by one of his employees, the son of Mr Weeder, director of the agricultural and forestry exploitation of his property in Ebenzweier, one of his residences in Austria, together with the house in Vienna and the castle in Puchheim. In this letter the suitor points out that the originals were daguerreotypes taken in Vienna in 1853, and the lower edge of the photographs shows references to the studio where they were taken. Thus, in the one of Don Carlos, cut by the reproduction, the name of the studio that made the originals appears, and the words daguerrotypie and Wien can be guessed, while in the lower corner of the one of the princess of Beira the name of the studio can be read between cuts. Don Alfonso Carlos had these photographs reproduced in 1931, using the two phototypes currently preserved, noting in his letter that very few people owned them.
These two photographs each reproduce two portraits, one of Don Carlos and the other of Doña María Teresa, in a double composition, although the images are not the same, as the sitters are in different poses. Both are captured in poses common to photography in the second half of the 19th century, which in turn follow and copy the pictorial models of the time. Don Carlos, a slightly smaller figure with three figures in an oval framework, is depicted seated in a slightly tilted position, with his right arm resting on a candlestick that can only be glimpsed, as can the back of the chair. His countenance is serious, his gaze absorbed, not without a halo of sadness, with his long, neatly trimmed white beard standing out against the sober suit he wears, among which the chain of his fob can be seen. In one of them, his head is turned to his left, and in the other he is facing the front, following the axis of his body. The suitor is cropped against a neutral background, without any props, subject, and his body shows no evidence of the after-effects of the hemiplegia he suffered in 1849, which paralysed his left side. frameworkOn the right-hand side of the photograph, registration"My grandfather Charles V (in 1853)", handwritten in black ink by Don Alfonso Carlos.
Similar in composition to the previous image are the portraits of the Princess of Beira, in this case in a rectangular framework, with a convex top. Maria Teresa, a three-quarter-length figure, is depicted seated in the same position as her husband, and probably with the same furniture, which, as in the photographs of Don Carlos, is barely visible. Set against a neutral background, she wears a lace dress, as does the black mantilla with which she covers her head, falling over her shoulders. Her wrists are bare, adorned with several bracelets, jewellery that is complemented by the rings on her hands and the brooch that adorns her neck. Her hands are elegantly relaxed, her head tilted to the left in one hand, and in the other, following the axis of her body, her gaze is absorbed with a hint of sadness, which contrasts with the strength of character she conveys. As in the one of Don Carlos, there is also a handwritten inscription in black ink by Don Alfonso Carlos at registration"María Teresa (my grandmother) IIª mujer de Carlos V - 1853" (Maria Teresa (my grandmother) IIª mujer de Carlos V - 1853). Both photographs lack a scenography to place them spatially or to indicate their status, offering great compositional austerity, which enhances the figure of the sitters with a fully photographic forcefulness. Both are now of mature age, and their faces reflect the hardships they had to suffer throughout their lives and the melancholy of exile.
Carlos María Isidro de Borbón y Borbón Parma, the first Carlist pretender to the Spanish crown, was the second son of Charles IV (1748-1819) and Maria Luisa de Parma (1751-1819), and therefore the brother of Ferdinand VII (1784-1833). He married his niece Maria Francisca de Braganza (1800-1834), daughter of King John VI of Portugal (1767-1826) and the Spanish Infanta Carlota Joaquina de Borbon (1775-1830). After the death of Maria Francisca in 1834, he remarried four years later to her sister, the Infanta Maria Teresa de Braganza (1793-1874), Princess of Beira. Conservative in outlook, he took an active part in Spanish politics and in the army, as, in view of his brother's lack of male descendants, he was the heir to the crown. However, in 1830 Ferdinand VII repealed, by means of a pragmatic sanction, the Salic law that prevented women from inheriting the throne, allowing his daughter to accede to the throne and thus postponing the rights of his brother Charles. However, the latter opposed this pragmatic law, moving his residency programto Portugal, where his brother-in-law Michael I, also conservative, was waging a civil war against his niece Maria II for the same reasons. On the death of Ferdinand VII, he refused to recognise his niece Isabella II as queen and proclaimed himself king, which triggered the First Carlist War (1833-1840). After Maria II's victory in Portugal, Charles V and his family left the neighbouring country and sailed for England in 1834, settling near Portsmouth. It was there that Dona Maria Francisca died, accompanied by her sister, the Princess of Beira, while her husband was in Spain taking part in the war. In 1839, after the embrace of Vergara, which sealed the agreementreached in that town between the two opposing sides, Don Carlos left Spain for exile, where he was reunited with his family. After passing through Paris, Genoa and Venice, the pretenders settled definitively in Trieste. In 1845 he abdicated his rights to the throne in favour of his son Charles VI, adopting the degree scrollof Count of Molina. This Withdrawalwas due to the possibility of marrying his heir to the throne to Queen Isabella II, thus re-uniting the two branches in dispute, projectwhich, however, did not materialise. In 1849 he suffered a hemiplegia that left him partially paralysed on the left side of his body, as well as a series of sequelae that led to his death five years later, in 1855.
The second of the photographs shows the portrait of Maria Teresa de Braganza, first-born daughter of John VI of Portugal, who from her birth until her brother's was heiress to the Portuguese throne, for which she received the degree scrollprincess of Beira. Dona Maria Teresa married in 1810 in Brazil to Pedro Carlos de Bourbon y Braganza, Infante of Spain and Portugal, and became the parents of Infante Sebastian Gabriel. Widowed in 1812, she settled at the Spanish court with her sisters Doña María Isabel, first wife of the Spanish monarch Ferdinand VII, and Doña María Francisca, wife of Infante Carlos María Isidro. With traditional and conservative ideas, and very religious, she was one of the main supporters of her sister and brother-in-law in their aspirations to the Spanish throne. On 2 February 1838, four years after her sister's death, she married Charles V, her widower, by proxy in Salzburg (Austria). The marriage was ratified on 21 October of the same year in Azkoitia, at the home of the Duke of Granada de Ega. The Princess of Beira was one of the main supporters of her husband, as well as of the Carlist cause, and after the death of Charles V she kept up the flame of the Carlist tradition and was the driving force behind the claims of Charles VII. In 1864 she published a manifesto, Carta de la princesa de Beira a los españoles (Letter from the Princess of Beira to the Spaniards), in which she recognised Charles as her successor, to the detriment of her father, Don Juan, Count of Montizón, whom she reproached for his liberal ideas. In fact, the Count of Montizón's liberal tendencies contrasted with the political and religious ideas of the rest of his family, including his wife María Beatriz de Austria Este, whom he eventually divorced in 1853. After Don Juan's abdication of his rights in 1868 to his son Don Carlos, the Princess of Beira became one of the pretender's main mentors. Her good relationship with her husband's grandchildren is evident both in these photographs and in the letter in which Don Alfonso Carlos announces his departure, in which he treats the princess as his grandmother.
Contrary to what it might seem, the photograph of Charles V is a very rare and important piece of art, as few photographs of him have survived, compared to the multitude of existing paintings, engravings and drawings that depict his portrait, so that thanks to the one studied here we are able to know the true image of the pretender two years before his death. The absence of photographic portraits of Don Carlos is strange, as although this art form was relatively young, having been born in 1839, it should be noted that two close relatives of the sitters, the Infantes Juan and Sebastián de Borbón y Braganza, the former son of Don Carlos and the latter of Doña María Teresa, were amateur photographers. Juan de Borbón y Braganza, Count of Montizón, was one of the founders of the Royal Photographic Society in 1853, and was a member of its committeefrom 1854 to 1866. His photographs of live animals, such as those at London Zoo, are particularly noteworthy. The Infante Sebastián Gabriel de Borbón y Braganza (1811-1875), meanwhile, was a member of the French Photographic Society from 1856, and as a photographer he favoured portraiture, strongly influenced by the painting of his time.
These photographs, as well as the letters exchanged between Elio Elío and Alfonso Carlos de Borbón y Austria Este, are now kept at fileof the Marquisate of La Real Defensa thanks to Isabel Doussinague y Brunet (1907-1974), mother of Joaquín Ignacio Mencos Doussinague, the current Marquis, whom Elio Elío Elío and Martina Doussinague Casares (1855-1933), his wife, adopted as they had no children from their marriage.
SOURCES
fileof the Marquisate of the Royal Defence. Vessolla Collection. Letters from Don Alfonso Carlos de Austria Este to Don Elio Elío y Magallón.
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