1871 he sold his Paris hôtel to the American collector William Henry Riggs for 188,500 francs and at the end of July he gathered his collection in Paris for transport to London, where he sold it "at a costly price" (400,000 francs) to the wealthy English collector Sir Richard Wallace, a friend of the deposed French emperor and his wife - it is thus now in the Wallace Collection. In July 1879, on coming to assist at the funeral of the prince imperial (killed in June 1879 in Zululand) Nieuwerkerke visited Wallace. The money raised by selling his collections and hôtel allowed him to move into exile in Italy, where in May 1872 he acquired the 16th-century "villa Burlamacchi" at Gattaiola near Lucca. There he lived the last 20 years of his life with his friends the Cantacuzène princesses, even starting a smaller collection of Renaissance Italian works (though he quickly had to re-sell his acquisitions). He died aged 80 and was buried in the cemetery at Lucca where, at Olga's request, the funerary chapel was ornamented with a bust of him by the sculptor Barré. One of his obituaries was written by Philippe de Chennevières (1820–1899), his closest collaborator and director of the Beaux-Arts (resigning in 1878). The current owner of the "villa Rossi" held many reminders of the count - anonymous photographs of his official marble busts of the imperial couple made to produce biscuit-porcelain medallions (1853), those of Olga Cantacuzène (1863) and of her husband prince Lorenzo Altieri (1876 ?), those of a Lucca peasant couple (1881) and official portraits, and one of the empress (possibly of a copy of that by Winterhalter). Bibliography Paolo Rinaldi, "Intérieurs de Toscane", Taschen, 1998, pp. 241–49 Suzanne Gaynor, « Comte de Nieuwerkerke: A prominent official of the Second Empire and his collection », Apollo, vol. CXXII, no. 283 (November 1985), pp. 372–79. Marie-Dominique de Teneuille and Sophie Laporte (ed.), Le comte de Nieuwerkerke. Art et pouvoir sous Napoléon III, Réunion des musées nationaux, Château de Compiègne, 2000. External links History of the villa burlamacchi Statue d'Henri IV par Emilien de Nieuwerkerke en 3D Émilien de Nieuwerkerke on data.bnf.fr Artists from Paris 1811 births 1892 deaths People of the Second French Empire French Senators of the Second Empire French people of Dutch descent Members of the Académie des beaux-arts 19th-century French sculptors French male sculptors Collège Stanislas de Paris alumni Directors