We've all heard of Napoleon, no matter how much history we did or didn't listen to. Napoleon is a historical figure of mythic proportions - more books have been written on him than Jesus Christ. An incredible number of biographies and histories revisiting his life come out every year. But most people don't realize that the emperor of France who terrified Europe with his military power owed much of his power, authority and good decision-making to his first wife, the Empress Josephine. Like Napoleon, Josephine has been the subject of many, many films and books over the years, but it's only recently that historians have begun to understand her as the powerful political and cultural figure she really was. The Mead Museum's exhibit, "The Empress Josephine: Art and Royal Identity," explores this new take on the empress through an exhausting collection of paintings, prints, caricatures, sculptures and books.
Josephine was much, much more than the pretty wife of the Emperor Napoleon. To begin with, her life story is a fierce adventure that would captivate anyone: born on a French slave plantation in the Caribbean to an aristocratic family, her first husband Alexandre Vicomte de Beauharnais had originally been promised to her sister, but when she died Josephine agreed to honor the engagement. By the time the Reign of Terror imprisoned him, they'd had two children who would later be recognized as Napoleon's own when she remarried. Alexandre died in prison, and Josephine found herself, too, in the Reign of Terror's prisons, where she remained until that government fell. She married Napoleon and was crowned empress of France during his coronation ceremony in 1804. Even though Napoleon divorced her in 1809 (because she could not produce an heir), she kept that title until she died.
This is not a story the viewer needs to know anything of to appreciate this show. "The Empress Josephine" brings the viewer through the story with paintings of her early life, etchings from the press, figurines and prints of the costumes that she and her husband wore in their coronation ceremony. Signs throughout fill the viewer in on the historical context of each piece, as well as simply offer interesting facts about Josephine's life. It's an inviting, richly varied perspective - we see Josephine's life through the media that her contemporaries did. The most interesting takes on her coronation and influence on Napoleon come from British newspapers of the period, which published wildly creative and mean-spirited caricatures of her life. In their efforts to ridicule France, many of the British artists drew a skinny, hen-pecked Napoleon utterly overwhelmed and dominated by his massive wife - ironically, the only artists who recognized Josephine as the powerful figure she was.
Not all the art comes from responses to Josephine - a very interesting portion of the collection are pieces Josephine commissioned of herself, her family and her husband in an early kind of public relations. By controlling how she appeared to the people, she could solidify her place as a true and legitimate empress of France. As the title of the show implies, art shaped Josephine's identity as a public figure - some of it under her control, and some of it not.
From the boost she gave to the popularity of roses to her support of the troubadour painting school, the show presents a wide-ranging view of her influence. Many of the pieces are just fun - an autobiography of a leading fortune-teller of Josephine's time has been included to show a chart of the empress' hand; toy-like tin figures of Josephine and Napoleon appear like strange action figures in the area dedicated to the coronation; each British caricature included is a magnificently strange and silly story to pick apart and laugh over (with the added boon that English-speakers can still understand the bizarre words that pool and float from the political figures' mouths). It's this irreverent touch that fills out and balances the portrait of Josephine that emerges through the show - for all the pomp and calculation, Josephine was just a really interesting person.
"The Empress Josephine" is joined now by "The Age of Napoleon and Josephine: Paintings, Prints, and Drawing," a collection of artwork from the same period. These pieces, as a matter of course, do not deal with the royal French family. Here we may see works in many different media: portraits, landscapes and still-lives. Seen on its own, the works seem to have been chosen quite at random, but with "The Empress Josephine" they give a fine perspective on what normal art was like when Napoleon and Josephine were harnessing it for their own political means.
"The Empress Josephine: Art and Royal Identity" and "The Age of Napoleon and Josephine: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings" will be at the Mead Museum of Amherst College until Dec. 28. The Mead is open from Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. - 4:30 p.m., and until 9 p.m. on Thursdays.
Be the first to comment on this article!