Empress Elisabeth, F.X. Winterhalter 1865
Elisabeth wearing a set of ruby jewellery, Georg Raab 1879
At Court
Elisabeth fulfils her official duties as empress only with the greatest reluctance. She dislikes pomp and court ceremony and loathes the rigid, hierarchical structures and intrigues of the Viennese court. On official occasions she feels according to her own words as if she is being paraded like a horse “in harness”. Sisi suffers increasingly from the loss of her freedom, writing:
I have awakened in a dungeon
With chains on my hands
And my longing ever stronger
And Freedom! You, turned from me!
Here for the first time the most famous portraits of the empress are being displayed together and accompanied by replicas of selected items of jewellery once owned by the empress but which no longer exist today. They have been reconstructed in collaboration with the firm of Swarovski as sponsor and set with original Swarovski crystals.
