Imperial husband and wife - two miniatures by Jean-Baptiste Isabey, 1810

Each miniature is 9.75 by 6.5 inches.

These portrait miniatures on ivory were intended as pendants and most likely commemorate the occasion of the marriage of Napoléon and his new empress, Marie-Louise of Austria. It is said they are dressed in their wedding clothes, but as there are several portrayals of them which are believed to represent their attire as worn that day - all of them differing slightly - it is difficult to be certain. In his portrait, the Emperor of the French is in court dress and wears the collier of the Légion d'Honneur about his shoulders, with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Iron Crown pinned to the left side of his chest. In his sword hilt is mounted the "Regent", the most famous diamond of the French crown jewels. The Empress is also wearing court dress and is resplendent in a ruby and diamond parure, the work of Nitot; from the necklace is suspended a miniature of the Emperor, also by the hand of Isabey.

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The Entry of Napoléon and Marie-Louise into the Tuileries Gardens on the Day of their Wedding, by Étienne-Barthélémy Garnier, 1810.

In Paris on 2 April 1810 Napoléon married the Archduchess Marie-Louise, eldest daughter of his political foe, the Austrian Emperor Franz I; Franz had agreed to the marriage as a political peace offering, and a marriage by proxy had been performed in Vienna two weeks previously. The eighteen-year old Marie-Louise met her new husband for the first time at Compiègne on 27 March; the marriage was apparently consummated that very night and the couple left for Paris the next day. On Sunday, 1 April 1810, there was a civil wedding held in the Galerie d'Apollon of the Château de Saint-Cloud, and the following day - riding in the coronation coach, accompanied by the cavalry of the Garde Impériale and the Marshals of France - they arrived at the Tuileries Palace and processed through the Grande Galerie of the Louvre to the Salon Carré - which had been transformed into a chapel by the Emperor's architects Percier and Fontaine - where the final, religious ceremony was held.

The bridal procession through the Grande Galerie.

The religious marriage ceremony in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, by Marie-Georges-Louis Rouget, 1811.

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 Napoléon présentant le roi de Rome nouveau-né à l'impératrice Marie-Louise dans sa chambre à coucher, aux Tuileries, a watercolor by the same Isabey, 1811.

It had been merely for dynastic concerns that Napoléon had told the Empress Joséphine at the end of 1809 that he must divorce her. He still loved her - and would always love her - but, now forty-six years old, she was unable to give him an heir. They were divorced in January of the next year and, only four months later, there was a new Empress of the French. A year later, on 20 March 1811, Marie-Louise gave birth to a son, the Emperor's all-important heir, and Napoléon-François-Charles-Joseph Bonaparte, roi de Rome, was the delight of his father. But three years later the Empire had fallen and Napoléon would never see his wife - the two had had an amicable realtionship - or son again, and the boy would be brought up at the Austrian court. After the abdication of his father in 1815, many of the latter's adherents referred to the boy as Napoléon II, and he would chafe at the restrictions increasingly placed on him in Austria; Chancellor Metternich was understandably worried about another Bonaparte rising to any degree of influence or power. Eventually given the title Herzog von Reichstadt, the boy also grew distant from his mother, who had married for a second time and had three more children. Described as intelligent, serious, and focused he died of tuberculosis at the age of only twenty-one.

Napoléon Ier présente le roi de Rome aux dignitaires de l'Empire, 20 mars 1811, by Marie-Georges-Louis Rouget, 1811.

L'Impératrice Marie-Louise veillant sur le sommeil du roi de Rome, by Joseph Franque, 1811.

Moments private, moments very public - four paintings by Tetar van Elven

Bal Travesti chez le Baron Lycklama, Villa Escarras, Cannes, 1874.

The host, the wealthy Orientalist, Tinco Martinus Lycklama à Nijeholt, stands right of center, his hand on his hip.

Fête de nuit aux Tuileries, le 10 juin 1867, 1867. This soirée occurred during the Exposition Universelle in Paris that year.

The Empress Eugénie is on the arm of the Emperor Alexander II of Russia while, behind, Napoléon III is engaged in conversation with King Wilhelm I of Prussia.

The baptism of the future King Carlos I of Portugal, 1863.

The infant was baptised with the names Carlos Fernando Luís Maria Víctor Miguel Rafael Gabriel Gonzaga Xavier Francisco de Assis José Simão.

King Karl XV & IV of Sweden and Norway, Queen Lovisa, and their daughter Princess Lovisa, the future consort of Frederik VIII of Denmark 1862.

An engraving of the French Emperor Napoléon III is on the wall behind them, and what looks to be a painting of the first Napoléon over the mantle.

Above Princess Lovisa is a portrait of Eugène de Beauharnais, Duke of Leuchtenberg, the stepson of Napoléon I and King Karl's maternal grandfather.

Jeune Berger, ou Adonis, by Barthélemy Blaise, 1785

Of white marble, the statue is 32 inches in height.

The story of Adonis has its source in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the first-century AD telling of the myth, he was conceived after Aphrodite cursed his mother Myrrha to lust after her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus. Myrrha had sex with her father in complete darkness for nine nights, but he then discovered her identity and chased her with a sword. The gods transformed her into a myrrh tree and, in the form of a tree, she gave birth to Adonis. Aphrodite found the infant and gave him to be raised by Persephone, the queen of the Underworld. Adonis grew into an astonishingly handsome young man, causing Aphrodite and Persephone to feud over him, with Zeus eventually decreeing that Adonis would spend one third of the year in the Underworld with Persephone, one third of the year with Aphrodite, and the final third of the year with whomever he chose. Adonis chose to spend his final third of the year with Aphrodite. One day, Adonis was gored by a wild boar during a hunting trip and died in Aphrodite's arms as she wept tears of sorrow. His blood mingled with her tears and became the anemone flower.

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Barthélemy Blaise (25 January 1738, Lyons - 2 April 1819, Paris), French sculptor. A student at the school of drawing in Lyon , he also studied in Rome. Back in Lyon by 1768, he worked regularly with the architect Martin Decrenice. He moved to Paris in 1785 and was soon accredited to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Adopting the neoclassical style, he exhibited his Jeune Berger, ou Adonis along with a Leda at the Salon of 1787. That same year he was given commissions by Louis XVI, including for the decoration of the not yet complete Panthéon, and for the mausoleum of the late Minister of State, the comte de Vergennes. During the Revolution, the artist was compelled to hide his work for the mausoleum - which was not installed in the church of Notre-Dame de Versailles until 1818, after the Restoration - then, during the Terror, he left Paris with his family. He later completed much work under the Bonaparte régime. He was awarded many commissions, both public and private, his subject matter ranging from religious and mythological imagery to portraiture.

The plaster model.

Grand - Madame Grand/Catherine de Talleyrand-Périgord, Princesse de Bénévent by Vigée Le Brun and Gérard

Portrait by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1783.

Very loosely adapted from the Metropolitan Museum's website - both paintings are in their collection - and other sources:

Noël-Catherine Verlée (or Worlée; 1761, Tranquebar, Tamil Nadu  – December 10, 1834, Paris), was the daughter of a minor French official posted to India. At the age of barely sixteen Catherine married a civil servant of Swiss descent working in Calcutta, George Francis Grand. The couple separated soon after, due to her brief but scandalous affair with Sir Philip Francis, a British politician. Subsequently, Madame Grand removed to London.

In about 1782 she moved to Paris where, being a beautiful blond, ill-educated but musical and clever, she became a very fashionable courtesan; the portrait that Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted of her in 1783 when she was only twenty-two attests to her lively personality and stunning looks at the time. She returned to Britain just before the French Revolution, but by 1794, with the Revolution waning, Madame Grand had returned to France.

Madame Grand now entered into a highly visible affair with Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, later prince de Bénévent, the brilliant - and infamously wily - statesman and former bishop of Autun, who had become a principal figure in the emerging government of the Directory. When she was arrested on suspicion of espionage in March 1798, Talleyrand secured her freedom. That same year, having been estranged from her husband for more than ten years, Madame Grand obtained a divorce in absentia.

Portrait by François Pascal Simon, baron Gérard, circa 1804-5.

Elaborate negotiations with Napoléon and the Vatican were required before the former bishop was allowed to marry, at Neuilly, on September 10, 1802; despite the First Consul's strong reservations, Napoléon and Joséphine signed their marriage contract. Upon their first official reception at the Tuileries, Napoléon is alleged to have remarked, "I hope that the good conduct of citoyenne Talleyrand will cause the fickleness of madame Grand to be forgotten." (The alternate - and more likely - version of the marriage negotiations is that Talleyrand was actually quite reluctant to regularize their union, and had to be coerced by Napoléon for the sake of propriety and his political career.)

With her less than respectable personal history, Napoléon ensured that Madame de Talleyrand was rarely at court; his Empress' own scandalous past was problem enough. At any rate, the couple quickly drifted apart, living separately; Talleyrand had already taken an official mistress, Madame Dubois, when he married, and was soon preoccupied with other women. Eventually, he arranged that his wife should go and live - luxuriously - in London. She returned to Paris in 1817, during the Restoration, and lived there quietly until her death at the age of seventy-three.

Lucien Bonaparte and Christine Boyer, his wife - three portraits by Jacques-Henri Sablet

Portrait de Lucien Bonaparte à Aranjuez. If the title is correct - I do wonder - this would have been painted during his time in Spain, circa 1801.

Lucien Bonaparte, 1st Prince of Canino and Musignano (born Luciano Buonaparte; 21 May 1775, Ajaccio - 29 June 1840, Viterbo), next younger bother of Napoléon. Born on Corsica and educated in France, he was much more genuinely radical than his famous brother. And though still in his teens, he became well-known and influential during the Revolution, an ally of Robespierre, his rise owing nothing to family connections. In the midst of the Reign of Terror, in May of 1794, he married his landlord's daughter, Christine Boyer (3 July 1771, Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume - 14 May 1800, Paris). Apparently illiterate, in the six short years of their marriage, she had four children, two of whom survived to adulthood, before dying at the age of twenty-eight. (Three years later he married a banker's widow and had ten more children.) With his great vigor, audacity, and with a convenient lack of scruples, Lucien had been instrumental in his brother's rise to power, but not long after Napoléon became First Consul in 1799, the relationship between the brothers first became strained. Six months after the death of his first wife, he was sent as ambassador to Spain, but on his return to France he was increasingly at odds with his brother's politics. And in 1804, unhappy with Napoléon's intention to declare himself Emperor, and with his demands that Lucien divorce his second wife in order to make a dynastic marriage, he went into self-imposed exile, living initially in Rome. After the Papal States were invaded by France in 1808, Lucien and his family were virtual prisoners. Attempting to escape to the United States two years later, they were captured by the British and spent the remainder of the Empire comfortably in England. Believing Lucien a traitor - France and England were at war - the Emperor struck his name from the Imperial lists. But when Napoléon escaped from Elba, Lucien rallied to his side and stood with him during the brief return to power. He returned to Italy at the Restoration and, after more than two decades indulging his love of archeology and other artistic endeavors, he died there at the age of sixty-five.  

Exhibited at the Salon of 1799, this portrait shows Christine Boyer with a bust of her daughter Victoire who was born and died two years before.

Lucien Bonaparte au château de Plessis–Chamant. Christine Boyer was buried there. He was apparently devastated by her death; he retired to
the château, and his mourning was so protracted that his brother, Napoléon, eventually had to intervene. This portrait is a sort of memento of
the marriage. I don't know when this was painted. But he looks older here than in the first image, so it seems it would have to be after 1801
but before his remarriage and the artist's death, both of which occurred in 1803.

Sablet has copied the entire portrait of Christine Boyer from the earlier painting.

Crown in a box - and the coronation of Charles X by Gérard.

Detail of Baron Gérard's coronation  portrait of Charles X.

The French crown jewels having been stolen during the Revolution, a new crown had to be made for Louis XVIII. Napoléon had finally left the stage - again - and the Bourbon Restoration was successfully established, but Louis still thought it politically imprudent to go through with a coronation. So, after modifications, the crown was used for the first and last time at the coronation of his brother and successor, Charles X, at Reims in 1825. The crown went into storage at the fall of Charles in 1830; his cousin, the new "Citizen King", Louis-Philippe, also thought that a coronation would set the wrong tone with the French populace. After he was overthrown, eighteen years later, the Bonapartes came back to power, and Napoléon III - who would also eschew a coronation - had the crown dismantled in 1854, the stones re-used in new jewelry. Then, sixteen years after the collapse of the Second Empire, the frame itself was melted down. A year later came the famous sale of the French Crown Jewels; republican France would never again have use for a crown.

The écrin-couronne; made of stamped and gilded Morocco leather on a wooden base, the crown's fitted case survives.

Gérard's scene of the coronation of Charles X, circa 1827.

Detail of above.

There are many copies and variations of Gérard's coronation portrait, circa 1825.

Detail of above.

A large-scale miniature of Gérard's portrait, the work of Henry Bone, 1829.

Detail of above.

Detail of the Bone miniature.

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Lastly, a plaster cast of the crown; casts of finished work were very frequently made by jewelers, especially in the case of important commissions. The crown was originally executed and later adapted by Christophe-Frédéric Bapst to the design of his uncle, Evrard Bapst. The base is in the shape of a band surmounted by sixteen fleur-de-lys alternating in size, the eight largest of which form the bases of arches which gather in the center and are surmounted by a finial in the shape of a fleur-de-lys. The entire surface of the crown was set with diamonds and sapphires - while the surface of the plaster cast is still covered in pencil markings, notes to specify the location of each particular stone.