Princess Eugénie of Sweden

Biography

Eugénie was modelling a figure in soldier’s uniform in clay, and the legs would not come right: the uniform served as her model, but the legs beneath it looked nothing like real ones. Then the court artist Fritz von Dardel agreed to pose. The queen dowager walked in on them and intervened, since a male model in the presence of her daughter and daughter-in-law was out of the question. By then the statuette, a Norwegian pipe blower, had turned out well, and it was later reproduced in porcelain at the Rörstrand factory.

The princess could not study human anatomy: her mother would not allow her to work from nude models. After the episode with Dardel, she was allowed to draw from children.

Eugénie was born on 24 April 1830 in the royal palace in Stockholm, the fourth child and only daughter of the future King Oscar I and Josephine of Leuchtenberg. She was named after her maternal grandfather, Eugène de Beauharnais. She had four brothers. The girl grew up without friends her own age and without dolls, playing boys’ games with her brothers, and by her own account she wished she had been born a boy. Closest to her was her brother Gustaf, Duke of Uppland: while he played music, she drew him among the ladies of the court, especially in summer at Tullgarn Palace. The children were taught by a governess and a court chaplain; both were domineering, and this was later connected with her submissive character.

Her teachers in music were the composer Adolf Lindblad and Isak Berg, in watercolour Anders Lundquist and Johan Christian Berger, and in sculpture Johan Peter Molin. At thirteen she began to compose. Surviving works include piano pieces (Queen Josephine’s polonaise, 1854; the Tullgarn gallop, 1853), songs, duets and sacred choral works. She was a friend of the composer Lotten Edholm. She is best known for her watercolours: scenes of court life, outings, journeys and balls, humorous and close in manner to Dardel. One of her works, a porcelain group of a dog and a child sitting opposite each other, “Can’t You Speak?”, was produced at the Gustavsberg factory and became a popular ornament. For her mother’s chapel she designed an allegory of faith and figures of the apostles Peter and Paul. Her work was shown at the Stockholm exhibition of 1866, and in November 1873 she became the first honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. In 1864 her book “Swedish Princesses” appeared, with biographies of princesses of different eras, and in the same year she translated from German a work by Magnus Friedrich Roos. One of her friends, Lina Sandell, wrote sacred hymns.

Eugénie never married. In 1846 she travelled with her brother Charles to Prussia, where she might have been presented as a prospective bride; by some accounts proposals also came from European princes, but nothing came of them. She herself valued the “sweet, independent life” of an unmarried woman. When in 1858 a law allowed unmarried women to obtain legal majority by application, she was among the first to use it.

The turning point was 1852. During a journey abroad and to Norway the royal family fell ill; Gustaf died, and Eugénie herself had pneumonia. Her health never recovered. In winter she occupied a few well-heated rooms of the palace and called those months her “winter imprisonment”. On the advice of her doctor Magnus Huss she first went to Gotland in the late 1850s, and soon built near Visby a three-storey wooden villa, Fridhem, with a park, pavilions and terraces. Musicians, writers and poets came to stay. She turned to religion, unwilling to tie herself to a single denomination: her mother was a Catholic, her father a Protestant.

Because of her illness she devoted less and less time to art and more to charity. In 1866 she founded an orphanage for boys at the villa, and three years later one for girls. In 1869 she opened a home for the terminally ill on Gotland, financed with the jewels of her grandmother Désirée Clary. In 1875 she organised a society to help the fishermen of Gotland’s west coast; in 1881, with a bishop, she founded the Visby City Mission; and in 1885, with her friend Adèle Rudenschöld, a society for the protection of animals. As chairperson of a society for the poor, the terminally ill and disabled children, she opened a home in Sundbyberg (1882), and later in Solna came the Eugeniahemmet, named after her (1886). She also helped the blind and poor students. Money went out so freely that the king instructed governors to “protect” his sister from importunate petitioners, and her brother Oscar II asked her to leave the family something of their mother’s inheritance. In her will of 1885 she left two thirds of her fortune to her nephews and the rest to charities.

Eugénie died on 23 April 1889, a day before her fifty-ninth birthday. She is buried in the Bernadotte vault in Riddarholm Church. She left the villa Fridhem to her nephew, Prince Oscar.