Portrait of Francisco Javier de Borbón (1757-1771), Prince of Spain, holding a cymbal, full-length, seated

The Infante Francisco Javier was the youngest son of Maria Amalia of Saxony and Charles VII of Naples who, from 1759, became King (Charles III) of Spain. He was born at Caserta but moved to Spain in 1759 when his father was crowned king. He lost his mother a year later, when he was just three years old, and died of smallpox at the age of just fourteen. Here, Francisco Javier is shown as a toddler: his pose derives from the double portrait of him and his older brother painted before 1759 by Giuseppe Bonito (formerly at Museo di San Martino, Naples, and now at the Royal Palace at Caserta).

We are grateful to prof. Nicola Spinosa for proposing an attribution to Francesco Liani on the basis of photographs. Born in Emilia-Romagna, Liani moved to Naples in the 1750s and worked as a portraitist at the royal court of Charles VII (and later that of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon). This portrait must once have belonged to a series depicting the monarch's children: others by Liani, in half-length format and depicting different siblings, are in Capua, Museo Campana (see N. Spinosa, Pittura napoletana del Settecento dal Rococò al Classicismo, Naples, 1987, p. 128, cat. 176, figs. 217 and 218).