Napoleon Crowned by Time — Print & Oil Painting

The strangest figure in the picture is the old man. Bare to the waist, enormous, a white beard falling to his chest and two dark grey wings folded up behind him, he leans in from the right and holds a laurel wreath just above the Emperor's head without quite lowering it. A scythe lies across the cloud below him, blade upward, clearly set down.

This is the allegory of Time, and the arrangement follows a French Salon painting of 1833 in which Time crowns Napoleon as he writes the Civil Code. The dark slab braced against his knee is that code. The lettering on it in this version is too faint to read.

Napoleon himself is painted calmly by comparison: a dark uniform coat with heavy gold epaulettes, a white waistcoat, white breeches, riding boots, and the star of an order at the breast. He looks straight out of the canvas rather than up at the wreath, and that is the whole argument of the composition. He is not receiving an honour, he is being placed out of reach of one.

The left third is a heap of trophies: a stack of standards, a green branch, a folded grey coat, a black bicorne, a fall of red cloth and a gilt eagle finial at the top. Everything rests on grey cloud, and a dark eagle spreads its wings underneath. From our Napoleon era collection, where the same army is seen from inside the ranks in Grenadier of the Imperial Guard.