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c.1885 PORTRAIT BELGIAN PRINCESS STEPHANIE, CROWN PRINCESS OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

STEPHANIE, KRONPRINZESSIN VON OESTERREICH-UNGARN. COPPER PLATE ENGRAVING BY AUGUST WEGER. Leipzig: A. Weger, [c.1885]. Antique copper plate engraved portrait of Princess Stephanine by August Weger. Single sheet, measuring 17 x 13 inches, printed on one side only, engraved with black-and-white portrait of a young Princess Stephanie. Stephanie was Crown Princess of Austria-Hungary from October 1, 1881-January 30, 1889. Very good condition, with very faint marginal staining, and few short tears in blank margin. It will be shipped carefully rolled.

Princess Stéphanie Clotilde Louise Herminie Marie Charlotte of Belgium (1864-1945) was a Belgian princess who became Crown Princess of Austria through marriage to Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Princess Stéphanie was the second daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium and Marie Henriette of Austria. She married in Vienna on 10 May 1881 Crown Prince Rudolf, son and heir of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria. They had one child, Archduchess Elisabeth Marie. Stéphanie's marriage quickly became fragile. Rudolf, depressed and disappointed by politics, had multiple extramarital affairs, and contracted a venereal disease that he transmitted to his wife, rendering her unable to conceive again. In 1889, Rudolf and his mistress Mary Vetsera were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide pact at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods.

In 1900, Stéphanie married again, to Count Elemér Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény, a Hungarian nobleman of lower rank; for this, she was excluded from the House of Austria-Hungary. However, this second union was happy. After the death of her father in 1909, Stéphanie joined her older sister Louise to claim from the Belgian courts the share of the inheritance of which they both felt they had been stripped.

Until World War II, Count and Countess Lónyay (elevated to the princely rank in 1917) peacefully spent their lives at Rusovce Mansion in Slovakia. In 1935, Stéphanie published her memoirs, entitled Je devais être impératrice ("I Had to Be Empress"). In 1944, she disinherited her daughter, who had divorced to live with a socialist deputy and whom she had not seen since 1925. The arrival of the Red Army in April 1945, at the end of the war, forced Stéphanie and her husband to leave their residence and take refuge in the Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary. Stéphanie died of a stroke in the abbey later the same year [wiki].

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