Napoleone Bonaparte dopo l’abdicazione a Fontainebleau

By the spring of 1814 the wars had caught up with Napoleon. The allied armies had taken Paris, his marshals were deserting him, and at the palace of Fontainebleau he sat waiting to learn whether he still had an empire. Delaroche paints that in-between hour. There is no throne and no battle, only a heavy man sunk low in a chair, his uniform rumpled, staring at nothing while the decision closes in on him. Within days he would abdicate and be sent to the small island of Elba. Delaroche made the picture in 1845, more than 30 years after the scene, for a France that had grown sentimental about its lost emperor under a new king. He painted more than one version of it, and this one has hung in Leipzig since the 19th century.