Objects

The jewellery worn by the Ladies in Waiting or Dames of Empress Eugenie’s Household are indicative of the sumptuous nature of the Empire and the brilliant technicity of French jewellery. The broach here also had a practical use: unlike the men in service to the crown, the ladies had no uniform. A specific broach was […]

In the decree of 10 July 1804, Napoleon I stipulated that the new imperial coat of arms should be “d’azur à l’aigle à l’antique d’or, empiétant un foudre du même” (“azure, with an eagle in the manner of antiquity, coloured gold, clutching in its talons a thunderbolt of the same colour”). After the proclamation of […]

This posthumous portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte carved in marble must be one of the most curious works to come out of the studio of French sculptor Auguste Rodin. It was commissioned in 1904 by the American collector Kate Seney Simpson,The daughter of a Brooklyn banker and art collector, George I. Seney and wife of New […]

6 November 1857, Madame, I needed all the prodigious presumption of a poet to dare to trouble your Majesty and bring to her attention a case as petty as my own. I have had the misfortune to be condemned for a collection of poems entitled “The Flowers of evil”, whose horribly frank title was not […]

The phonautograph, the first machine ever to record sound, was invented during the Second Empire, in 1853, by the Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (1817-1879). Using a technique analogous to that of today’s seismometer (which converts earth tremors into a visual signal), the phonoautograph consisted of a membrane, placed at the end of an acoustic […]

Click here for an enlargement The first playing cards appeared in Europe at the beginning of the 14th century. However, even as late as the 18th century, they were by no means unified in their style. In France, the pack comprised the four classic suits – spades, diamonds, hearts and clubs (the French word trèfle […]

Swiss-born Abraham-Louis Bréguet was encouraged to go into watchmaking by his step-father Joseph Tattet, who came from a family of watchmakers and had a showroom in Paris. Bréguet completed his apprenticeship under an horlogist in Versailles. He established his own house in Paris in 1775 on the Quai de l’Horloge and became a master in […]

Joseph Bonaparte, a new king for Spain On 20 July 1808, Joseph Bonaparte arrived in Madrid, the capital of what Théophile Gautier was to describe as the most “anti-classical” country in Europe. In comparison with Paris – and even with Naples where Joseph had reigned for two years, Madrid was a small town that had […]

The Palais Impérial de la Bourse (Imperial Palace of the Stock Exchange) was conceived by Napoleon as part of a wider political and architectural program. Upon his coming to power with the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon was determined to rebuild the political institutions of France which had for a decade been shaken by Revolution. […]

Magritte made four versions of this work, “L’Avenir des statues” (‘The Future of Statues’), in the period 1933 to 1937. He took a commercial plaster version of Napoleon’s death mask and painted onto it a deep-blue sky spotted with sunlit clouds. According to David Sylvester, it is only the polish on the plaster and the […]