The Empress Joséphine

This portrait stayed in Joséphine's family for more than 60 years. Prud'hon probably began it around 1805 and did not finish it until 1809, the year Napoleon divorced her because she had given him no heir. He set the empress alone on a rock in the park of Malmaison, the country house west of Paris that she had made her own, in a white dress embroidered with gold and a red cashmere shawl, her face turned inward. The picture hung in her painting gallery at Malmaison.

When Joséphine died in 1814, it went to her daughter Hortense, the former queen of Holland, who took it into exile at Arenenberg, her house above Lake Constance in Switzerland. Hortense's son became Emperor Napoleon III, and he hung his grandmother's portrait in his apartments at the Tuileries palace in Paris. After his fall in September 1870 the state sequestered his belongings, and the question of what had been his private property went to the courts. In 1879 a judgement gave this canvas to the Louvre.