Carl Theodor von Piloty and Franz Adam | Portrait of Empress Elisabeth of Austria

Francis Joseph of Austria was enthralled with his beloved Angelic Sissi. After her death, there was nothing he longed to rest his eyes on more than the image of the woman he had fallen for in 1853. The painting, which hung over his bed at the Hofburg Palace, shows Elisabeth in front of Possenhofen Castle, her parents' summer residence in Bavaria. The emperor's mother had arranged for him to marry her older sister, but the 15-year-old, whom everyone called Sissi, caught his eye instead. Sissi gave the emperor the portrait on the Christmas Eve following their betrothal, so the family dubbed it the engagement present. The day was also Sissi's 16th birthday, and the very busy Joseph had insisted on coming to Munich for the party. Unusually for the time, the painting depicts Sissi on horseback. The artists were Carl Theodor von Pelloti, the famous genre picture painter, and Franz Adam, the leading equestrian painter of his day. Sissi, who had only recently taken up writing, chose the subject. Few portraits capture her as authentically as this one. She was a born equestrian, slim, strong, and bold to a fault, and she had a way with horses, one of her and her husband's few shared passions. The painting became the property of Francis Joseph's estate when he died in 1916. Now, just over a century later, this slice of Habsburg history is about to become auction history.