Porträt Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788)

Portrait of Charles Edward Stuart. The presenter of the throne, born in Rome, is shown here as a chest, as a young man with a friendly view. He wears a long, curly wig and a part of an armor with sash. The effigy is oval and like a medallion is embedded in a shell. A kind of base with its name, birthday and stand can be recognized. To the left, a putto with a calyx in one hand and a blowpipe in the other hand squats and conjures up bubbles of soap in which crowns float. Around the portrait, it looks like on a ship’s deck, so that the base could also be part of a ship’s armor. On the right appears a winged, male figure with a beard in a loose garment and vibrates a scythe powerfully. It just divides a rope on which an anchor hangs, which now strikes the ship’s deck, so that wood barley and water penetrates. The other end of the rope is held by a female figure with robe, who turned her face towards the effigy. She squats on an elevated part of the deck as if fleeing from the incoming floods. In the background on the left there are other declining ships. The entire assembly is an allegory of its failure to take the English throne. Charles Edward Stuart was born in exile. His father, James Francis Edward Stuart, was the throne pretender for the throne of Britain and Ireland, but Stuart wanted to assert these claims at the death of his father, but they were denied him. At the age of 14 he moved to the Polish War of Succession and stayed in France. From then on, he set off with two ships to Britain to regain the Scottish and English throne for the Stuarts. He failed, as can be seen in the leaf. The leaf has no signature, possibly it was a test print. In contrast, the artist has already put the writing in the leaf and has also framed the figures or drawn the crowns into the soap bubbles. There is a template or imitation to the engraving, which probably comes from Johann Christian Püschel (1718-1771), who executed a sideways variant to the leaf, which is now in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. The art collections of the Veste Coburg and the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg attribute the paper to the Augsburg scrapist Gabriel Bodenehr (1705-1792). Caption: CAROLVS EDVARDVS Primogenite (us) Praetendentis Magnae Britanniae. natus Romae d. 31 Dec. 1720. [in subject] d. 6th et 7. Mart 1744. (Stiftung Händel-Haus Halle Foundation)