Emperor Napoleon I

In July 1807 Napoleon made peace with the Russian tsar at Tilsit and created a new kingdom of Westphalia in Germany for his youngest brother, Jérôme. The same year Jacques-Louis David signed this panel, his second try at an official portrait of the emperor in coronation robes. The first, a full-length for the law courts in Genoa, had been refused, Napoleon writing that it was so full of defects he could not accept it. Here David made the figure calmer. The throne is set back and turned at an angle, and the crown and the hand of justice wait on a table to one side. Napoleon turned this design down too. Harvard describes the panel as the model for a larger picture now lost, and from 1808 David reused the composition for a full-length ordered by Jérôme. Among the panel's later owners was Richard Wallace, the collector whose London house became the Wallace Collection.