Portret van Lodewijk XVII van Frankrijk after 1793

Editor: Here we have a print titled "Portrait of Louis XVII of France," created sometime after 1793 by Jeremias Snoek, currently housed here at the Rijksmuseum. It strikes me as quite somber, perhaps because it's a memorial image? I’m curious, what do you see in this piece? Curator: Somber indeed, isn’t it? The boy king… so much potential, brutally extinguished. You know, I always find engravings so fascinating. Imagine the level of precision, the dedication involved in creating these tiny, deliberate marks to convey so much information. And in the neoclassical style, the idealised form... Look at the perfect profile! One almost forgets the turmoil swirling around this child’s existence. Do you think the artist intended to portray innocence lost? Editor: It’s possible, I suppose, considering the context. But the cold, clean lines of the engraving almost seem to remove the emotion. Or maybe contain it, like a tightly shut box? Curator: Precisely! It's that very tension between the Neoclassical restraint and the raw tragedy of the subject that makes it so compelling. Think of the engraver, Sleeck himself, wrestling with how to depict royalty during a revolution, how to show, how to conceal… the knife cuts deep into the plate. What echoes of that do we hear today, I wonder? Editor: It's interesting how technique and style can shape our understanding of historical events. I’ll definitely be looking at engravings differently from now on. Thanks! Curator: And thank you. Art, like a cracked mirror, shows us not what was, but what might still be.