Portrait of the Sisters Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte

By 1821 the Bonapartes were scattered. David himself, once Napoleon's official painter, was living out his exile in Brussels, banned from France after the emperor's fall. That year the wife and two daughters of Joseph Bonaparte, refugees in Belgium, came to sit for him. The girls lean together holding a letter from their father, who had fled to Philadelphia after Waterloo, and their closeness is the point of the picture. Look at the sofa and you find bees stitched into it, the Napoleonic emblem kept quietly alive in a family that no longer ruled anything. The same year, far off on Saint Helena, Napoleon died. The Getty version is thought to be David's original, worked and reworked, with visible changes still readable beneath the surface.