Émilien de Nieuwerkerke

Count Alfred Émilien O'Hara van Nieuwerkerke (16 April 1811, Paris – 16 January 1892, Gattaiola, near Lucca) was a French sculptor of Dutch descent (his grandfather was the illegitimate son of a minor stathouder) and a high-level civil servant in the Second French Empire. He is also notable as the lover of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, after her estrangement from her husband Anatole Demidov.

Émilien de Nieuwerkerke was the son of the Dutch Legitimist officer Charles de Nieuwerkerke (1785, Lyon – 1864, Paris), who returned to Paris with Louis XVIII in 1815 after the Hundred Days, and Louise-Albertine de Vassan (died 1854), from a noble family from the Soissonnais. After having become a page of Charles X in 1825, he then entered the école royale de cavalerie at Saumur in 1829. However, as a legitimist, he abandoned his career on Charles X's fall in July 1830 during the July Revolution of 1830.

On 30 June 1832, aged 21, he married count Auguste de Monttessuy's daughter Thécla (1810–1884) at Auguste's château de Juvisy (the town's town hall since 1900 - Auguste had been the commune's mayor from 1823 to 1835). Thécla's brother Gustave was a diplomat and mayor of Juvisy and married Pauline de Württemberg, illegitimate daughter of Prince Paul - uncle of Mathilde Bonaparte - and of Lady Whittingham. However, the couple quickly separated on grounds of incompatibility of temperaments.

Vigorous, majestic and with a certain air to him, to which he joined physical presence, a great amenity, well-spokenness and the art of compliment - he thus became known as the "beautiful Batavian" ("beau Batave"). He was adored by women (one declared "He has the air of a resting lion"), as the Goncourts affirmed in their Journal of 10 November 1863 - "he at once resembles Charlemagne and a handsome chasseur behind the cars". In 1834, during a six-month stay in Italy, he discovered and became passionate about ancient sculptures. He also became fascinated by the work of the famous sculptor Félicie de Chauveau, whom he met in Florence, and thus decided to become a sculptor himself on returning to France. He thus took classes in the studios of Pradier and baron Carlo Marochetti and attempted a statuette of his cousin Horace de Viel-Castel, who became curator of the "Musée des Souverains" at the Louvre in February 1853 and a chronicler of the imperial court. Sculpting also suited him due to the freedom that attached to it and meant that he did not have to find another.

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