Paintings

Standing portrait of Napoleon III, wearing the uniform of a Général de Brigade, in his Grand Cabinet at the Tuileries Palace Versailles, Musée National du Château The Prince-President became ‘Emperor of the French’ under the name Napoleon III. In 1853, he commissioned the specialist in religious painting, Hippolyte Flandrin, a pupil of Ingres’s, to paint […]

The Empress surrounded by her maids of honour Compiègne, Musée du Second Empire Portrait painter to the courts of Europe, Winterhalter became the official painter of the imperial couple. In this exceedingly famous painting, he took his inspiration from 18th-century bucolic scenes and set the sovereign and her attendants in a shady forest clearing. And […]

Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino, 24 June, 1859 Compiègne, musée du Second Empire At the beginning of the Second Empire, Meissonier was known only for his Dutch pastiche genre scenes. When the emperor bought a painting from him in order to offer it to Queen Victoria in 1855, however, Meissonier’s career was made. […]

Napoleon III hands to Baron Haussmann the decree annexing the Parisian suburban communes Paris, Musée Carnavalet In Paris, Napoleon III had an ambitious policy of urban regeneration. And he brought this policy to fruition through the talents of Baron Haussmann, Préfet of the Seine. On 1 January,1860, 11 communes were annexed: Auteuil, Passy, Les Batignolles, […]

The excavation of the Avenue de l’Opéra Paris, Musée Carnavalet The transformations made by Haussmann completely remodelled the capital. Second Empire society was witness to the disappearance of old Paris in favour of a healthy, aerated city, with large arterial roads giving excellent views of the recently built monuments, as can be seen here (the […]

Ball at the Tuileries Compiègne, Musée du Second Empire The Expositions Universelles of 1855 and of 1867 greatly contributed to the spread of the image of the splendour and pomp of imperial France. In 1867, all of the sovereigns of continental Europe came together in Paris, Alexander II, Franz-Josef, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Kaiser Wilhelm […]

The execution of Maximilian Manheim, Stadtisch Kunsthalle At the same time as the huge Parisian triumph of the Exposition Universelle of 1867, international news arrived, casting a terrible pall over the fête. It was on 1 July, the very day on which the imperial couple were to distribute the prizes, that Paris learned of the […]

The First Consul crossing the Alps at the Grand-Saint-Bernard pass Musée National du Château de Malmaison Without a doubt the most famous painting of the Napoleonic legend. David here exalts what was in fact quite a prosaic reality, namely that Napoleon crossed the pass riding a donkey, wearing not a magnificent cloak but a simple […]

General Bonaparte at the Conseil des Cinq-Cents at Saint-Cloud, 10 November, 1799 Versailles, Musée National du Château This, the best-known representation of the coup d’etat, was a commission by king Louis-Philippe for the Musée Historique de Versailles, an institution founded in 1837 with the aim of fostering national reconciliation. The painting shows the critical moment […]

Bonaparte visiting the plague victims of Jaffa, 11 March, 1799 Paris, Musée du Louvre This masterpiece, a precursor of Romanticism, was commissioned by Napoléon in an attempt to quash rumours that he had poisoned French troops suffering from the plague during the Syrian campaign. Painted and exhibited in 1804, coinciding exactly with the creation of […]