Olivia Gruber Florek’s The Celebrity Monarch: Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait reads Elisabeth’s celebrity monarchism as a template for twentieth-century celebrity culture. Gruber Florek begins her study with an analysis of the famous state portraits of the empress by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the go-to portraitist of nineteenth-century European aristocracy. She argues that these images, which differ from previous paintings of queen consorts, “disrupted centuries of aristocratic representation and established new patterns for subsequent female portraiture” (4). Unlike Winterhalter’s paintings of the French Empress Eugénie, for example, the portraits of Elisabeth do not emphasize or even reference her royalty, and they do not gesture toward her husband. There is no Hermine, no mantle, no crown, and no tiara. Instead, Elisabeth’s unstyled hair and attire (a dressing gown) highlight individuality rather than rank. Gruber Florek argues that the portraits are influenced by celebrity photos of contemporary performers, which foreground theatricality and rely on exteriority effects, a concept coined by Sharon Marcus that encompasses direct eye contact, striking facial expressions, and captivating bodily movements. More precisely, the Winterhalter portraits were influenced by carte-de-visite photography, which was patented by André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in 1854, the same year the sixteen-year-old Elisabeth, Duchess of Bavaria, married Franz Joseph of Austria and became empress of a multinational, multilingual empire. Disdéri’s process, the printing of multiple images on a single glass plane, greatly reduced the cost of portraiture, making it widely available.

Empress Elisabeth was an avid collector of such cartes de visite, which she compiled into three Albums of Beauty. She enlisted the help of Austrian ambassadors across Europe, who collected images of queens but also actresses, dancers, and even prostitutes on her behalf. In the albums, the juxtaposition of queenly portraits and erotic imagery of the demi-monde points to the public’s obsession with the queen’s fecundity, her ability to produce an heir. Interestingly, the woman who appears most frequently is Elisabeth’s sister Marie, the former Queen of the Two Sicilies and Naples. Marie, who resisted Giuseppe Garibaldi’s invasion of Naples, had achieved some measure of fame, which, as Gruber Florek suggests, provided a model for Elisabeth’s return to public life after several years of illness. The cartes de visite inspired Elisabeth to fashion herself as a celebrity monarch while creating a new form of celebrity representation in the process: Elisabeth was perceived to embody individuality and authenticity even as she was also a performer of a role and a co-creator of that role.

Chapter 2 explores the matter of Elisabeth’s gigantic hair, usually contained in a braided crown but displayed in its unruly glory in Winterhalter’s two informal portraits. Long, curling hair is a typical feature in representations of biblical figures, such as Mary Magdalene, and in photographs of nineteenth-century performers, such as the Viennese actress Charlotte Wolter or the Parisian thespian Sarah Bernhardt. While the voluminous hair of the periwig signaled male power, uncontrolled hair in women carried an erotic charge, but it also signaled authenticity, naturalness, and even authority since the sitters were in control of how they presented themselves to the viewer. Gruber Florek argues further that Elisabeth’s unstyled hair influenced fin-de-siècle paintings and Viennese modernism, which is not typically seen as inspired by the Habsburgs. Gustav Klimt’s femmes fatales, in particular, have the same overly long, unbound hair, visualizing both allure and danger.

Chapter 3 focuses on the proliferation of images of Elisabeth and other members of the royal family, which were widely available in the form of trinkets, memorabilia, such as cups, and cartes de visite. The latter, sold in bourgeois photography studios and included in family albums alongside relatives, served to legitimize Habsburg rule while satisfying the public’s demand for access. Paradoxically, however, while images of Elisabeth with her family abound, they are all photomontages cobbled together from individual portraits; only one authentic photograph of Elisabeth and her children is extant. Yet, while Elisabeth not only refused to sit for photographs after age thirty (that is, after 1870) and broke with a tradition that highlighted imperial motherhood, photomontages fabricated a more compliant model of the monarch. Gruber Florek argues that Elisabeth’s seclusion from public life, exacerbated by her extended absences from Vienna, combined with the ubiquity of her image echoes contemporary celebrity culture, which plays out against binaries of intimacy and distance, singularity and reproducibility.

Chapter 4 centers on Anton Romako’s uncommissioned portraits of Elisabeth. Gruber Florek argues that the unsettling emphasis on decay and melancholia, expressive of Elisabeth’s public struggle with mental illness, links these images not only to the contemporary psychiatry of Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Jean-Martin Charcot but also to works of Expressionist artists such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. In representing the empress as the quintessential nervous woman, Romako removed madness from the realm of the socially marginalized and paved the way for the obsession with female hysteria in fin-de-siècle art. Drawing on Leo Braudy’s work, chapter 5 offers an interpretation of a 2007 exhibition by T.J. Wilcox that featured the Austrian empress alongside Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Jerry Hall. Wilcox showcases the performativity of monarchy as well as the violation of privacy and the threat of violence tied to celebrity culture.

Gruber Florek’s book is a pleasure to read. It is chockful of interesting information about nineteenth-century politics, art, and photography. Readers will benefit from her many insightful readings of a wide variety of visual material—though I am not entirely convinced that Elisabeth should be seen as a co-author of her portraits. Gruber Florek’s argument about Elisabeth’s co-authorship rests on visual and contextual links between the Winterhalter portraits and the Albums of Beauty, which Gruber Florek calls Elisabeth’s “most significant artistic creation” (93). This is plausible, though the claim would be more convincing if it could be buttressed by relevant passages in Elisabeth’s letters or any other evidence that allows insights into the empress’s artistic vision, especially since, as Gruber Florek points out, Winterhalter had already begun to integrate elements of celebrity photography in his works from the early 1860s. Overall though, Gruber Florek’s book substantially enhances our understanding of Franz Josef’s Austria and fin-de-siècle culture and art. I highly recommend it.