Forty-six sheets from an album of Princess Maria Amalia of Bourbon

These forty-six drawings, each individually mounted on an album page, were originally part of an album made for, or assembled by, Princess Maria Amalia of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, wife of the Spanish Infante Sebastian of Portugal and Spain (1811-1875). The album was bound in green velvet and decorated with the Princess’s monogram. Originally the album contained a total of sixty-one pages, but in modern times all the leaves were removed from the binding and mounted separately. The title page, also bearing Maria Amalia’s initials, is among the drawings in this lot. Of the forty-six drawings offered for sale, thirty-one are now framed.
Some of the drawings are unsigned, but many bear signatures of various 19th Century Spanish and Italian artists, including Joaquín Espalter y Rull (1809-1880), Luis Ferrant y Llausás (1806-1868), Vicenzo Morani (1809-1870), and Federico de Madrazo (1815-1894). Some of the sheets are dated in Rome in the 1840s.
The group presents a rich and attractive variety of subjects, ranging from romantic landscapes and genre scenes (Nuns singing in the choir of a church), to figures in exotic costumes (a Greek standing near ruins), and literary themes taken from Virgil, Dante, and Cervantes. Each album page is decorated by an anonymous artist who created the colorful and inventive borders, executed with exceptional care, probably at the time when the album was assembled. The painted frames enliven the drawings and relate to them thematically. A drawing with Shipwrecked sailors, for example, is surrounded by nautical emblems; a Harbor scene is inscribed within nets, fish, and shellfish. The drawings with literary subjects are surrounded by borders resembling Medieval manuscript pages. It appears that the drawings were collected by Maria Amalia during the first ten years of her marriage, around 1835-1845.