The original contrasts the banality of the Great Man’s pose in this painting: legs akimbo, slung arm, dirty boots, hat at feet, round belly, dismounted sabre. The original isn’t as small as JS’s, but executed in a grander scale typical of the academic historical painting style. The full title of the original painting, owned today by the Leipzig Museum der Bildenden Kunste, dated 1845, is Napoleon I at Fontainebleau, 31 March 1814. She smuggled the painting out by train in the lining of her luggage. JS’s great uncles presented her with the little portrait in the late 1970’s when she visited relatives in Leipzig, behind the Iron Curtain. The brass plaque underneath reads, erroneously, “ Horace Vernet, Levachez fils.” However, this image is after a painting by Paul Delaroche, a brilliant historical painter of the mid-19th Century. Here we see a sad little man looking pudgy and despondent. JS owns a painting on porcelain of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (1769-1821), not painted in the way we usually picture the Emperor.
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