Portrait of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (1841): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (1841) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Essex (British, 1784–1869).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Unlike fragile portrait miniatures painted in watercolor on vellum or ivory, which are prone to cracking, fading, and flaking, enamels are resilient, impervious to the effects of light, and retain their striking original colors over time. Partly for this reason enamel was considered ideal for reproducing famous paintings and treasured portraits in a reduced and luminous form. The complicated and labor-intensive process of enameling required the artist to fire numerous layers of colored metal oxide at different temperatures. This process made it difficult to produce a faithful portrait likeness, though masters of the medium were able create portraits of remarkable subtlety imbued with the sitter's personality. The desire for portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte helped to create a market for miniatures that William Essex was fueling long after the emperor's death.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French
• Date: 1841
• Creator attribution: William Essex (British, 1784–1869)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Portrait Miniature
• Technique: enamel on copper, gilt metal and plush mount in a turned wood frame
• Dimensions: Framed: 13.5 x 11.5 cm (5 5/16 x 4 1/2 in.); Unframed: 6.6 x 5 cm (2 5/8 x 1 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2000.106

A detail from the museum

Napoleon wears the green uniform of the chasseurs á cheval, including a green coat with a red collar over a white waistcoat and gold epaulets indicating his status as a general.

Collection credit

Gift of Mabel Porozynski in honor and remembrance of Eugene Porozynski

Further reading listed by the museum

• Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain). Royal Academy Exhibition. 1853.
• Cincinnati Art Museum, Julie Aronson, and Marjorie E. Wieseman. Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2006.
• Korkow, Cory, and Dario Robleto. Disembodied: Portrait Miniatures and Their Contemporary Relatives. 2013.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.