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Alfred Guillaume Gabriel D'orsayAlfred Guillaume Gabriel d'Orsay (September 4, 1801 – August 4, 1852), the Comte d'Orsay, was a French wit and dandy of great benevolence and charm and manly beauty, as well as a skillful amateur painter and sculptor, who showed his paintings at the Royal Academy from 1843 to 1848; he was well thought of by Lord Byron and Sir Edwin Landseer. His intimate friendship with the Earl and Lady Blessington brought him into the innermost circles of London society, where he was an arbiter of taste in the 1830s and 1840s. D'Orsay was the son of a Bonapartist general and a daughter, it is said, of the King of Wurttemberg. He was outstandingly handsome and served in the garde du corps of Louis XVIII of France. In service at Valence in 1821, and recently returned from London, he met the Earl of Blessington, and his wife, a highly literate Irish beauty. The Earl and Countess invited him to travel with them in Italy, where in the spring of 1823 the party met Lord Byron. D'Orsay returned with them to England. In December 1827, dOrsay married the fifteen-year-old Lady Harriet Gardiner, the daughter of Lord Blessington by his previous wife, but the couple soon separated, and the elegant menage trois, continued as before. After Blessingtons death in 1829, dOrsay and Marguerite, Lady Blessington, became the center of a fashionable artistic and literary circle in London, centered on her salon at Gore House, where one of the most frequent guests was Prince Louis Napoleon, soon to be Napoleon III. In 1849, to escape creditors, he and the Countess of Blessington both fled to Paris, where Louis-Napoleon was now prince-prsident. In 1852, the Emperor Louis-Napolean named him Director of Fine Arts for France, but before his fortunes could change, d'Orsay had died. Portraits and drawings of prominent political and literary figures by d'Orsay are in major collections: his portrait of the Duke of Wellington in the National Portrait Gallery, London, a watercolor of Byron in the Victoria and Albert Museum External links d'Orsay
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