The Empress Marie-Louise

In the spring of 1810 Napoleon, who had divorced Joséphine because she had given him no heir, married Marie-Louise, the 18-year-old daughter of the Austrian emperor whose armies he had beaten the summer before. France suddenly needed likenesses of a new empress, and François Gérard painted her that same year. This one is small and close, head and shoulders only, with flowers pinned in her dark curls, drop earrings, a white high-waisted dress and a green shawl slipping from her shoulders. The painter kept it in his studio for the rest of his life. When his estate was auctioned in April 1837, three months after his death, the sale held two bust portraits of the empress. The doctor Louis La Caze bought this one for 299 francs. The other probably reappeared at auction in Paris in 2015. In 2017 this canvas was lent to an exhibition on the flower painter Pierre-Joseph Redouté, who had given the young empress drawing lessons.