Paintings : 41
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PaintingNapoleon I on his Imperial Throne
This painting, one of the best-known representations of Emperor Napoleon I, was Ingres’ second portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte. The promising young student of David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), was one of several artists to receive an official commission to portray Napoleon dressed in one of the many different Coronation robes that the Emperor wore during the […]
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PaintingPhotograph of Prince-President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte
On 11 December 1848, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was elected (the first, and only) President of the Second Republic, by universal male suffrage. It was from the Elysée-National (the Elysée Palace, chosen by the Assembly to be the official residence of the President of the Republic) that the future Emperor prepared the coup d’etat of 2 December […]
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PaintingPortrait of Joseph Bonaparte
Joseph Bonaparte was born on 7 January 1768 just over a year earlier than his brother Napoleon. He studied Law in Pisa in 1787 and began his career in Corsica, as a lawyer in Bastia, then as a judge at the Ajaccio Law court just as the French Revolution broke out. He took refuge with […]
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Painting / Directory / 1st EmpirePortrait of Treasury Minister François-Nicolas Mollien
On his return from Austerlitz, Napoleon decreed on 17 March, 1806, that his ministers should be painted by some of the best painters of the era (Gros, Kinson, Prudhon, Lefèvre inter alia) and that these likenesses should hang in the salon adjacent to the Salon des Maréchaux in the Tuileries Palace. Amongst these ‘civilian marshals’ […]
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Painting / Directory / 1st EmpirePortrait of Caroline Murat, Grande-duchesse of Clèves and of Berg
This portrait, painted in 1807, marks the meeting of two exceptional women: Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, survivor of the Ancien Regime, and Caroline Bonaparte, sister of Emperor Napoleon I, a new ruler in an invented land. Vigée Le Brun was, in effect, an escapee of the Revolution. Already a well-known portraitist from her early […]
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Painting / Directory / 1st EmpireSt Helena 1816 – Napoleon dictating to Count Las Cases the Account of his campaigns
When the Scottish painter William Quiller Orchardson exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy in 1892, he was sixty years old and had established a long career, which began at the age of fifteen when he entered Edinburgh’s renowned art school, the Trustees’ Academy. Orchardson was a talented portrait artist but one of his favourite […]
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Painting / Directory / 1st EmpireJoachim Murat on horseback
Presented at the 1812 Salon, this portrait by Antoine-Jean Gros of Joachim Murat, King of Naples, on horseback in 1806 echoes another work that Murat had commissioned: The Battle of Aboukir, July 25, 1799, a monumental painting (5.78 m 9 68 m Palace of Versailles), which remains one of the greatest Orientalist masterpieces of the Empire. […]
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Painting / Directory / 1st EmpireNapoleon Bonaparte on Board ‘Bellerophon’ in Plymouth Sound
In this full-length portrait of Napoleon, Charles Lock Eastlake represents the deposed Emperor, dressed in the green uniform of a colonel of the “chasseurs à cheval de la Garde”, on the bridge of Bellerophon which he had boarded on 15 July 1815, ultimately putting his fate in the hands of the British Prince Regent, after […]
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Painting / Directory / 1st EmpirePortrait of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord by François Gérard
This portrait of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838), Prince of Benevento, reflects the reputation of its subject: fearless and serene, with a slight smile (even a smirk?) on his lips. When Gérard painted it during the year 1807-1808, Talleyrand had resigned as Napoleon’s foreign minister on the 10 August, 1807 because of his opposition to […]
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Painting / Directory / 1st EmpireThe Duke of Wellington at Waterloo (18 Juin 1815)
The image presented here is a chromolithograph, in other words a colour lithograph (based on four colours – three primary colours and black – giving a full palette of tones) a printing method precursor to the offset printing process which largely replaced it from the 1930s onwards. It’s a rather rare example of a colour […]