The prince reminded me that I had promised to spend a few hours with him on that day at his house on the Kalemberg. Before going thither he wished to go to Isabey’s to sit for his portrait, and he asked me to accompany him.
‘During that hour of torture to me,’ he laughed, ‘you will have an opportunity of looking at a series of portraits from his brush. Isabey is the recorder of the Congress in pigments. And inasmuch as he is almost as clever with his tongue as with his brush, you’ll not waste your time.’
In a short time we reached the artist’s quarters in the Leopoldstadt. The front of the house was provided with a barrier to prevent the deadlock of the visitors’ carriages. Isabey’s arrival at Vienna had been preceded by his deserved reputation.[56]
Presented by the Duc de Sérent to Marie-Antoinette, Isabey, at the age of twenty, painted the portrait of the lovely and ill-fated queen, who treated him with the utmost kindness, and always called him her little Lorrain. Subsequently, having become the painter-in-ordinary of Napoleon, he reproduced the features of all the celebrated men and all the handsome women of the Empire. It was he who superintended the fêtes of that brilliant and short-lived era.
At Vienna, all the European celebrities solicited the distinction of reproduction by his brush, and he could scarcely comply with all their requests. The number of portraits he painted at that period is positively surprising, and supplies a proof of his talent having been as fertile as it is graceful. Whenever there was a question of organising this or that entertainment for which the Congress was the pretext, the artist who had drawn the designs for Napoleon’s coronation was, as may be imagined, considered in the light of a ‘God-send.’ Nothing was done without consulting him.
According to Isabey himself, it was M. de Talleyrand who had prompted the idea of his going to Vienna; and art is indebted to that journey for his remarkable and historical drawing of a ‘Sitting of the Plenipotentiaries at the Congress.’
The fall of Napoleon deprived Isabey of nearly all his functions. One day, in the study of the statesman who at that time was supposed to have mainly contributed to that catastrophe, the artist spoke regretfully of a restoration which, as far as he was concerned, spelt ruin. On one of the walls of the room hung an engraving of the ‘Peace of Munster,’ after Terburg. Pointing to it, Talleyrand said, ‘A Congress is to be held at Vienna. Why not go there?’ The few words were as a ray of light in the darkness to Isabey, and from that moment his mind was made up. Talleyrand did more than give a hint. He gave him a most cordial welcome, and proved a kindly and appreciative patron.