Neither Napoleon nor his wife Joséphine were faithful during their marriage, but she failed to produce the heir that the Emperor wanted. In 1809, he informed her that he had to find a wife who could provide an heir, and they divorced the following January. Pierre-Paul Prud’hon went on to paint her successor Marie-Louise of Austria as well.

Following his marriage to the eighteen year-old Marie-Louise of Austria, the new Empress became pregnant, and on 20 March 1811 gave birth to their son, who was soon made King of Rome. That year, Prud’hon painted this Portrait of the King of Rome, setting him asleep in a glade with a waterfall behind. Prud’hon was also involved in decorating a crib for the infant.

Meanwhile, the Emperor’s youngest sister Caroline had married one of Napoleon’s most brilliant cavalry officers who succeeded Joseph Bonaparte (the emperor’s older brother) as King of Naples. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, known best for her brilliant pastel paintings, used oils for this portrait of Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, with her Daughter Letizia in 1807.

Napoleon had continued leading French forces from his success at the Battle of Austerlitz in Austria in 1805, through Eastern Europe, then in Spain in 1808, where he installed his older brother Joseph as king. However, the French invasion of Russia in the summer of 1812 proved a disaster.

Ary Scheffer’s account of The Retreat of Napoleon’s Army from Russia in 1812 (1826) shows this march of death starting from Moscow in the middle of October 1812, which took until the middle of December to clear Russian territory. In the appalling winter weather, Napoleon’s Grande Armée is claimed to have shrunk from 100,000 to around 22,000.

The tide had turned. The following year Napoleon was decisively defeated at Leipzig, France was invaded, he was forced to abdicate in April 1814, and was exiled to the island of Elba, in the Mediterranean between Corsica and Tuscany. He escaped and returned to France, where he and his forces were defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. He was finally sent to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821.

JMW Turner’s War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet from 1842 shows an imagined moment from Napoleon’s exile on the British island of Saint Helena, no doubt inspired by the return of the emperor’s ashes for state burial in France in 1840. In the background is one of the British sentries stationed on this remote island to guard the former emperor. Napoleon is bowing slightly to a tiny limpet on a rock, a symbol of the futility of war. The sunset behind forms the sea of blood resulting from Napoleon’s many battles across Europe.

Michel Ney (1769-1815) was a leading military commander during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was made a Marshal of France by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested, and tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers. He was found guilty, and executed by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815. He refused a blindfold, and was allowed to give the command to fire upon himself.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Death of Marshal Ney (1868) uses a similar narrative approach to Gérôme’s earlier paintings of the murder of Caesar, in showing a moment after the climax of the story. Ney’s body is abandoned, slumped and lifeless on the muddy ground, his top hat apart at the right edge of the canvas. Behind where he stood but a few moments ago there are half a dozen bullet impact marks on the wall, as the firing squad is being marched off, to the left and into the distance.

For a few brief weeks after Napoleon’s abdication, he tried to make his son the King of Rome his successor, as Napoleon II.

His cousin Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had been born in the Tuileries Palace in Paris. After Napoleon I had been sent to Saint Helena, the rest of the emperor’s family were dispersed elsewhere. Louis Napoleon joined the Swiss Army, developed political aspirations, and in 1836 led an attempted coup from Strasbourg. After a period of exile in London, he attempted a second coup in 1840 that quickly turned into a fiasco. He escaped from prison in 1846, fled to London, only to return to Paris after the French Revolution of 1848. He then gained a place in the National Assembly, where he campaigned successfully for election as President of France. He staged a further coup in December 1851, and won a referendum enabling him to proclaim himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, on 2 December 1852.

Gérôme articulated Napoleon III’s aspirations for empire in his elaborate and formal painting of the Reception of Siamese Ambassadors by Napoleon III (1864), depicting a grand reception held at Fontainebleau on 27 June 1861. Gérôme had attended in the role of semi-official court painter (commissioned by the State), made sketches of some of the key figures, and was further aided by photographs made by Nadar. He also included himself, and the older artist Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891), in the painting: I believe that they are both at the back, at the far left.

Cabanel’s life-sized full-length portrait of the Emperor Napoleon III from about 1865 proved controversial, as many felt that his image of their emperor should have greater grandeur. Some critics even accused Cabanel of making him look like a hotel manager or waiter, and I can see their point. The Empress Eugénie and Napoleon’s family had no such qualms, though: Cabanel’s painting was hung in the Tuileries Palace, and when the Second Empire collapsed, and the empress fled to Britain, she took this painting with her into exile.

Napoleon III clearly lacked his uncle’s flair for military leadership, and declaration of war against Prussia on 19 July 1870 led to a series of disastrous defeats ending with the Battle of Sedan, a fortified French city in the Ardennes. The French Army surrendered to the Prussians and Napoleon III became a prisoner of war.

Emil Hünten’s undated Welcome of Empress Eugénie by Prussian Soldiers shows an event that never occurred. When the Empress was told of her husband’s surrender to the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan, she is reported to have said: “No! An Emperor does not capitulate! He is dead!… They are trying to hide it from me. Why didn’t he kill himself! Doesn’t he know he has dishonored himself?!” With hostile crowds forming outside her Tuileries Palace, she slipped out to find sanctuary in the company of her American dentist, then fled to England by yacht on 7 September 1870. She was later joined by the former emperor, and the couple lived at Chislehurst in Kent.

Perhaps the most lasting memorial to these French emperors is the Suez Canal. During Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1798, he had engineers and others search for an ancient canal running north from the Red Sea. In 1804, the new Emperor considered constructing a canal to connect the south-eastern Mediterranean with the Red Sea. Early in the reign of Napoleon III, Ferdinand de Lesseps obtained a concession to construct the canal that Napoleon I had dreamed of. The Suez Canal was officially opened on 17 November 1869, with both the Empress Eugénie of France and the Crown Prince of Prussia present as guests.

Painted by the great marine artist Ivan Aivazovsky shortly after that official opening in 1869, Suez Canal shows a convoy of ships passing through in an unearthly light. Within a year the Second Empire had fallen, but Napoleon’s canal went on.

The most famous French person, born a Corsican of Italian origin, who died on the British South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, was the Emperor Napoleon I. His life, battles, wives and descendants have been painted repeatedly by some of the great artists of the nineteenth century, from Girodet to JMW Turner. This weekend I show a few of those images of greatness and downfall.

Napoleon Bonaparte rose rapidly through the French army following the French Revolution of 1789, until he became its commander for the campaign against Austria and Italy in 1796.

About a century later, Georges Clairin’s painting of Napoleon’s Troops in Front of San Marco, Venice provides a biased gloss on the fall of the Venetian Republic to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797. The French occupation around 4 June may itself have been relatively peaceful, but by the end of July had been declared a siege, with the arrest and imprisonment of many Venetians. Later in the year, the French plundered the city of many of its artworks, something that Clairin seems to have overlooked.

As a national hero, Napoleon and his army travelled on to invade Egypt and Syria in 1798.

In 1806, Napoleon commissioned Pierre-Narcisse Guérin to paint for the Gallery of Diana in the Tuileries Palace. The result was Napoleon Bonaparte Pardoning the Rebels at Cairo, 23rd October 1798, completed in 1808.

Napoleon had taken the French army into Egypt in 1798, and conquered Alexandria and Cairo. On 21 October, the citizens of Cairo organised an uprising, and murdered the French commander and Napoleon’s aide-de-camp. The French fought back with artillery, then the cavalry fought their way back into the city, forcing the rebels out into the desert, or into the Great Mosque. Napoleon brought his artillery to bear on the mosque, following which his troops stormed the building, killing or wounding over five thousand. With control restored over Cairo, the leaders of the revolt were hunted down and executed. Following this, the city was taxed heavily in punishment, and put under military rule.

Guérin’s painting shows a very different event, in which Napoleon is engaged in open discourse with the rebels. However, the presence of French cavalry behind the Egyptians, and the action taking place at the far right, suggests the truth behind this ‘pardon’.

In 1810, Girodet painted the only reasonably accurate account of The Revolt of Cairo of 21 October 1798 and Napoleon’s massacre of the city’s residents. Most were killed when French cannons fired at the Al-Azhar Mosque where they were seeking refuge. This is a late oil sketch for the finished painting.

Léon Cogniet was also called to document Napoleon’s empire, painting his Bonaparte’s 1798 Egyptian Expedition (1835) on a ceiling in the Louvre Palace, as an explanation of how so many Egyptian artefacts came to be in Paris, ironically now on display in that same building.

Jean-Léon Gérôme made several paintings showing Napoleon in Egypt, including this highly detailed and intricate version of General Bonaparte and his Staff in Egypt from 1867.

In November 1799, Napoleon used these military victories to engineer a coup and became First Consul of the French Republic.

In early 1800, Napoleon made moves to reinforce French troops in Italy, so they could repossess territory lost to the Austrians in recent years. Leading his Reserve Army, he crossed the Alps via the Great St Bernard Pass in May, and his troops fought their first battle at Montebello on 9 June. Paul Delaroche was commissioned to paint a faithful account of this. His Napoleon Crossing the Alps from 1850 does at least sit the First Consul astride a mule, the only mount capable of carrying him in these conditions, but it’s still a good way from the truth. Napoleon’s face is bare, his left hand uncovered and resting on the pommel of his saddle, and he’s wearing a thin cloak and thin riding breeches.

In 1803, Napoleon sold the French territory of Louisiana to the United States, and at the end of the following year crowned himself Emperor of the French, giving him near-absolute power.

Among the paintings of François Flameng showing the Napoleonic period, one of the most striking is this scene of Napoleon Hunting in the Forest of Fontainebleau, in which the pack is closing in on a cornered stag as the sun sets.

At about this time, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s paintings became appreciated by the emperor’s court, and Napoleon himself. He was thus commissioned to paint the Empress Joséphine. Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, as she was before marrying the Emperor in late 1804, must have been forty-one or forty-two years old at the time of Prud’hon’s commission, and a widow with two children. Most unconventionally, it must have been agreed that she wouldn’t be portrayed in her official role of Empress.

Prud’hon’s black chalk Study for a Portrait of Empress Joséphine, from 1805, perhaps shows the original concept of the Empress in her role as patron of the arts, complete with a lyre, reclining on the coast, against a background of trees.

His finished painting of The Empress Joséphine (c 1805) dispenses with the lyre and seats her on a stone bench in woodland, looking pensive if not slightly wistful.

But Joséphine failed to become pregnant by Napoleon, and four years later he informed her that he had to find a wife who could provide him with an heir.

Although of ancient origin, in Europe the idea of laying carpet on the floor is surprisingly recent. Woven and backed textiles resembling modern carpets appear to have originated in the Caucasian area and in Anatolia, and first made their way to western Europe with the Crusades. It was another seven centuries before Europeans realised they weren’t only intended to be hung from walls or placed on tables. Their wider adoption as floor coverings may have been limited by the difficulties in cleaning by beating them outdoors.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Carpet Merchant (of Cairo) from 1887 shows a contemporary trading scene in almost photographic detail. Standing on and among crumpled up carpets in this corner of a souk is a group of traders and their customers, admiring one particularly fine example hanging from a balcony as they haggle over price. As an image within an image, Gérôme paints the calligraphic design of the carpet in painstaking detail.

You could easily mistake Georges Rochegrosse’s undated Palace Entertainment for another by his contemporary Gérôme, although by this time (the period 1894-1914) Rochegrosse was often far more painterly in his style. It shows a dancer with musical group entertaining some Algerian men, her routine involving a pair of short swords. Under her feet is a large and brilliant scarlet carpet.

Carpets were also in widespread use as floor coverings throughout Turkey and the Middle East, as shown in Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting of Reciting the Quran from 1910. At its foot is a wonderful deep blue carpet.

In Philip Hermogenes Calderon’s “Lord, Thy Will Be Done” from 1855, the small and threadbare piece of carpet tells you more about this young mother’s financial and social status than any other object in the room.

Among the early depictions of floor carpets is James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s chinoiserie interior painted in 1863-65, which might give rise to geographical confusion.

Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, is shown above and in the detail below. The model’s features are European rather than Oriental (she was actually from an Italian family), but she’s wearing a fine silk kimono and holding a fan. Behind her is a painted screen from Japan, and under her feet is a lush white and blue carpet.

This is the painting at the focal point of the lavish dining room of the London house of Frederick Richards Leyland, a shipping magnate. Whistler and Leyland fell out over changes the artist made to the original design, and Whistler was forced into bankruptcy as a result. The contents of the room were purchased in 1904, moved to the USA, and exhibited in the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, from 1923.

In Giovanni Boldini’s Peaceful Days (The Music Lesson) from 1875, a younger boy sits on a vividly decorated carpet studying an epée, with a cello behind him. Judging by their dress and surroundings, these two are at least comfortably off, and certainly well-carpeted.

There’s also something indulgent and sensuous about lying back on an exotic carpet, in the way that this woman is in John William Waterhouse’s Dolce Far Niente or The White Feather Fan (1879). She’s plucking feathers from the fan and watching them rise through the air, a perfect way to while away the time, it seems.

William Merritt Chase’s paintings of his studio acted as a shop window for prospective customers. In his Studio Interior from about 1882, a fashionably dressed young woman is glancing through a huge bound collation of Chase’s work, sat by a grand carved wooden sideboard, decorated with almost outlandish objects including a model ship, a lute, and sundry objets d’art. Under her feet is a wonderful blue carpet, no doubt ready to transport her into the scenes shown in Chase’s book.

By the turn of the century, and Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestic scenes such as Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures (1904), the prosperous were having wall-to-wall carpets fitted in their houses. The lady of the house is standing on a patterned carpet that runs under the bed, and at the left extends to the wall.

Colours and patterns soon became vibrant if not gaudy.

In Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in Bathtub from about 1938-41, the flooring dazzles, and Marthe’s brown dog has its own mat.

Eric Ravilious’ Farmhouse Bedroom (1939) overwhelms the viewer with the patterns in its flooring that contradict rather than complement its walls.

Across much of the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, this is the wettest part of the year. It’s when puddles are everywhere, and what used to be firm ground turns into soft deep mud. Footpaths and bridleways become deep tracts of mud, impassable in anything but high boots. Yet look through paintings of winter and you’ll notice that few artists before 1800 have depicted people, vehicles or animals in mud of any significant depth. This weekend I look at some of the more faithful accounts of this ingloriously muddy time of year.

In the early nineteenth century, streets in major cities in Europe including Paris spent much of the winter as muddy morasses. Enterprising poorer inhabitants took long planks to locations where the more affluent would try to cross those rivers of mud, and hired them out to enable the rich to stay cleaner.

This is shown well in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Passer Payez, or Pay to Pass, from about 1803, where a whole family is taking advantage of one of these crossings. This spared their footwear and clothing the otherwise inevitable coating of mud. As you can see, their shoes, lower legs and clothing are amazingly clean, as if they might actually have been painted in Boilly’s studio rather than the muddy streets of Paris.

As realism and real-world scenes became more popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, Adolph von Menzel showed a more accurate view of the problem of muddy roads in his Hussars Rescue a Polish Family from 1850. It had clearly been a wet autumn, with the leaves still burning red and gold on the trees in the background. These mounted soldiers are helping the elderly women from their carriage across the muddy ruts of the road. The hussar in the foreground, with his back to the viewer, even has mud on his riding boots.

One of the first artists to have used mud in a more meaningful way is Jean-Léon Gérôme, in his 1868 painting of The Death of Marshal Ney. Michel Ney (1769-1815) was a leading military commander during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was made a Marshal of France by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested, and tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers. He was found guilty, and executed by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815.

Gérôme shows Ney’s body abandoned after the execution, slumped face down and lifeless in the mud, his top hat resting apart at the right edge of the canvas. The firing squad is being marched off, to the left and into the distance. The mud only reinforces Gérôme’s powerful image of a cold, bleak, heartless execution.

Mud also has its recreational uses, as children of all eras will attest. Ludwig Knaus’s painting of Mud Pies from 1873 shows a group of children in the evening, near Dusseldorf, Germany, who are enjoying play in and with the mud, which is less fun for the swineherd behind them.

While other Impressionists had been exploring the effects of transient light on the River Thames, in 1875, Giuseppe De Nittis examined the city’s muddy and rutted streets, in his painting of The Victoria Embankment, London. This wasn’t one of the older roads in the city either: the Victoria Embankment wasn’t constructed until 1865, and had only opened to traffic five years before De Nittis painted it.

Muddy roads in northern British cities like Leeds were one of the favourite settings for the nocturnes of John Atkinson Grimshaw. At The Park Gate from 1878 (above) and November from 1879 (below) are glistening examples.

There’s an old English proverb “February fill dyke, be it black or be it white”, referring to the rain (black) or snow (white) that usually falls heavily during the month and fills all the ditches. Benjamin Williams Leader borrows that in his February Fill Dyke showing the waterlogged countryside near Worcester in 1881.

Mud became a favourite effect in the Naturalist paintings made so popular in France by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) shows a cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud.

But for real mud, deep enough for wheels and legs to sink in and cake clothing, I turn to central and eastern Europe.

Jakub Schikaneder’s The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse towing a cart on which a coffin rests. The woman, presumably widowed before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. It’s late autumn in a world that is barren, bleak, muddy and forlorn.

Józef Marian Chełmoński’s undated Market is one of the most vivid insights into country life in Poland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To reach this street market, carts are being drawn through a deep ditch full of muddy water. Market stalls are mounted on tables set in the mud, which forms the basis for everything.

Also undated is contemporary and fellow Polish artist Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski’s Meeting the Train. A couple of horse-drawn carts have gone to a rural railway station to meet a train. The winter snow still covers much of the ground, except where it has been turned into rutted mud on the road.