The Empress Joséphine
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758-1823) · 1805
The empress sits on a mossy rock in a shaded park, in a white dress with a red shawl draped across her lap, her head resting on one hand. Her face is thoughtful, almost melancholy, and the trees close in behind her so that she seems alone with her thoughts. The setting is the park of Malmaison, her country house west of Paris, and the picture was painted in eighteen hundred and five, the year after Napoleon crowned her at Notre-Dame. There is no crown here, only a fashionable woman in a landscape.
Prud'hon was the painter Joséphine liked best, and he gave her his softest manner: the light falls on the white dress and the bare arms and dissolves into the dark greens of the foliage, in a chiaroscuro learned from Leonardo and Correggio. The signature is at the lower right. The portrait remained in the imperial family and belonged to Napoleon the Third; after the fall of the Second Empire it was assigned to the Louvre by a court decision in eighteen seventy nine. Look at the pose, an ancient gesture of contemplation that turns an official image into something private and slightly sad.
Did You Know? Joséphine is shown not on a throne but on a rock in the park of Malmaison, the country house she loved, in the year after her coronation.
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