Ritratto di Napoleone III

Winterhalter painted this official likeness in 1853, only months after Louis-Napoleon had himself proclaimed Emperor Napoleon III on the first of December, 1852. A new emperor needs a face to send around his realm, and Winterhalter was Europe's most sought-after painter of crowned heads. He stands the emperor in full court dress beside a draped table bearing the crown and sceptre, one hand resting near the old regalia of French kingship. It is a picture built to travel and to be copied, and copied it was, in studio after studio. The version first made for the Tuileries Palace burned there in 1871, in the fires that ended the Paris Commune. What survive are the replicas, and this is one of them, kept today in the Napoleonic museum in Rome.