19th century French school, after Robert LEFEVRE (Bayeux 1755-1830 Paris) Portrait of Pauline Borghese (1780-1825), née Bonaparte. Oil on canvas. 53.5 x 45 cm. In a giltwood frame decorated with palmettes. Size with frame: 65 x 56.5 cm. Our painting is an elegant copy of the 1806 half-body portrait of the princess in Versailles (65 x 54 cm., Musée National des châteaux de Versailles et Trianon, inv. MV 4711). "Notre-Dame des colifichets", as Napoleon called her: she was his favorite sister. Pauline, "the spoiled child" of the imperial era, as Hortense de Beauharnais called her, was born in Ajaccio and experienced the precarious beginnings of the Bonaparte family during the Revolution. Her brother's fortune brought her ease and made her one of the most courted women of her time: Junot, then Fréron, sought her out for her beauty. She was promptly married to General Leclerc in 1797, and followed him to Saint-Domingue in 1801, where he died of fever. Back in Europe, she married the Roman prince Camille Borghese in 1803, lived in Rome in antique splendor, posed for Canova as a nude Venus and soon became bored. In 1805, she became Duchess of Guastalla, separated from her often-absent husband, and accumulated liaisons, from Forbin to Talma, "as beautiful as it is possible to be", wrote Metternich, but entirely given over to the cult of herself and to pleasures. The fall of the Empire left her diminished and ill; taking refuge in Rome with the pope's benevolence, she tried in vain to get closer to the Borghese, obtaining only a few subsidies and the use of the family palace and the Pincio villa, now a museum. Expert : Pierre-Antoine MARTENET.