Audio Stop 217

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A man with pale peach skin and dark hair wears a military uniform and stands in front of a desk in this vertical portrait painting. He nearly fills the composition so seems close to us, and he looks directly at us. His body is angled slightly to our left and he tucks his right hand, on our left, flat against his chest between the buttons of his jacket. His navy-blue waistcoat is white along the front where it is fastened with brass buttons along his chest. The jacket has red cuffs, gold epaulets on the shoulders, and three medals affixed to the chest. White britches end just below the knee, and white stockings covering his calves are wrinkled at the ankle above black shoes with brass buckles. A candle burns low in a lamp on an ornately carved and gilded desk behind the man. Books and papers are piled on the desk to our right. More papers and a thin sword rest on a chair in front of the desk to our right. The chair is also carved and gilded, and is upholstered with scarlet-red fabric decorated with gold bees. The legs of the chair push back the forest-green carpet underfoot. A tall clock stands on the wall opposite us and reads 4:13. A few capital letters are written on a scroll of paper on the chair, “COD.” The artist’s name is also written as if printed on a scroll of paper on the floor behind the desk to our left: “LVD.CI.DAVID OPVS 1812.”

Jacques-Louis David

The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, 1812

West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 56

Associate curator Aaron Wile explores the mythmaking in Jacques-Louis David’s portrayal of the emperor Napoleon.

Read full audio transcript

AARON WILE:
What fascinates me about this painting is that it offers a distinctly modern vision of political authority. I'm Aaron Wile, Associate Curator in the Department of French Paintings.

NARRATOR:
Jacques-Louis David here portrays Emperor Napoleon in his study with his signature pose, hand in waistcoat.

AARON WILE:
The clock tells us it's 4:13 in the morning, and we see that he's been working all night. The candles are nearly melted down, his hair is disheveled, his cuffs are unbuttoned. We can see from the large rolled-up piece of paper on his desk that he's been working on his most famous legislative achievement, the Napoleonic Code, which gave post-revolutionary France its first coherent set of laws. David shows Napoleon, just as he's risen from his work, and he's about to gird his sword and leave to review his troops.

NARRATOR:
A famous book beneath the desk chronicles the achievements of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.

AARON WILE:
And this sent a clear message that Napoleon’s achievements equaled or surpassed those of Greece and Rome.

The portrait, with its almost hallucinatory realism, every detail, every texture is painstakingly rendered, strikes us with the force of truth - it feels like a documentary record, but in fact it's a fiction, it’s a lie. Several distinct moments and objects in his broader history are collapsed into this single image. And in this way, the painting’s participating actively in mythmaking. And I think it's up to us to look more closely to understand how myths are constructed and how political legitimacy of someone like Napoleon is maintained.

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