Objects : 3
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ObjectNapoleon wrapped in his dream
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 […]
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ObjectThe Future of Statues
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 […]
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ObjectThe Reliquary of St Helena: souvenirs of the return of Napoleon’s Mortal Remains
After Napoleon’s death on 5 May 1821, a secular cult began to grow around him, propagated by the testimonies of the men and women who had accompanied him to St Helena. At the same time iconography in which Napoleon was compared to the mythological Prometheus became popular. The Napoleonic cult peaked at the time of […]