Portrait of Hortense de Beauharnais

In June 1806 Napoleon made his brother Louis king of Holland, and Louis's wife, Hortense de Beauharnais, the emperor's stepdaughter, found herself queen of a country she barely knew. When the Rijksmuseum bought this portrait in 1998, the museum's own magazine announced it under the headline "Queen against her will". Her marriage was unhappy, and in May 1807 her eldest son, aged four, died of croup in The Hague. After that she lived mostly in France, and a return in 1810 was brief. Girodet painted her sometime between 1805 and 1809, around the years of that reluctant reign. The pearls pinned into her curls form a tiara, a royal jewel, and a pale shawl falls over her arm. Behind her shoulder, a thin waterfall drops through a dark wooded gorge.