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.

Ovid has raced through the destruction of Troy and its nobility, including the death of Priam, the herding together of the Trojan women to be taken as trophies, and the vicious murder of Astyanax.

As the Greek ships prepare to depart, Priam’s widow Hecuba is the last to board. Her youngest son Polydorus has been secretly in the care of King Polymestor in Thrace, who was paid a great sum to protect him. With Troy destroyed and that source of income lost, Polymestor slit the child’s throat and threw his body into the sea.

The Greek fleet shelters off the coast of Thrace, again waiting for favourable winds. While there, the ghost of Achilles appears and demands the sacrifice of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena in appeasement.

As with Iphigenia’s sacrifice a decade earlier, it’s now the turn of Hecuba’s daughter to be sacrificed to secure good weather. Polyxena is taken from the arms of her mother and put before the altar where Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, stands ready with his knife. Polyxena pleads eloquently for her body to be given to her mother without a ransom, a speech bringing even the priest to tears. Nevertheless, he thrusts the knife into her breast, and she falls to her knees, still resolute, but dead. The Trojan women mourn her and care for her body, so her mother can embrace her in final farewell. Hecuba then responds in a long speech of lament.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s fine painting of Hecuba and Polyxena, from after 1814, is superb in its treatment of fabrics, but more puzzling in its narrative. Hecuba, the older woman, appears to have fainted, presumably at the announcement of Polyxena’s imminent sacrifice, with her daughter kneeling at her feet.

Several paintings show the sacrifice of Polyxena, of which Charles Le Brun’s from 1647 is arguably the finest, and in superb condition. Polyxena is being led to the altar as Hecuba tries to hold her back. Behind Polyxena is the same Neoptolemus who threw Astyanax to his death, threatening to kill her where she is.

Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s The Sacrifice of Polyxena, from about the same time, shows the moment the priest is about to sink his knife into the woman’s breast. A young assistant, their head averted, kneels ready with a large bowl to catch the sacrificial blood.

Hecuba then walks down to the beach for a jar of seawater, and stumbles across the body of her son Polydorus. She is initially struck dumb, and freezes like a rock with the shock. As that subsides, her wrath grows. She makes her way to meet with Polymestor, on the pretext of wanting to show him some hidden gold. He immediately starts lying to her, so she flies at him, burying her fingers deep into his eyes to blind him. She is then stoned by Thracians, and is transformed into a dog, and that place is named Cynossema, the dog’s tomb.

The Vengeance of Hecuba is a magnificent Macao tapestry from the seventeenth century, showing Hecuba and three other women sealing Polymestor’s fate for his murder of Polydorus. Hecuba is poking his eyes out, as the others swing long wooden clubs at him.

Giuseppe Crespi probably painted his version of Hecuba kills Polymestor in the early eighteenth century. His skilful composition makes it a chilling but carefully implicit image, as a woman associate holds the king down, and Hecuba reaches up to remove his eyes. Crespi has minimised the amount of limb visible in the upper part of the painting, to keep the composition there clean and clear. He seems to have compensated for that in the legs of the lower half, made even more complex by deep shadow.

The goddess Aurora joins in the lament over the destruction of Troy. She had not only supported the Trojan cause, but her son Memnon had been killed by Achilles in combat. She is stricken with grief, and can’t bear to watch his cremation on the funeral pyre. She kneels before Jupiter and begs him that her dead son might be granted an honour. Jupiter agrees, and the smoke from Memnon’s pyre darkens the whole sky, as might have happened during a major volcanic eruption. That smoke is then transformed into a flock of birds, the Memnonides, in honour of Memnon.

Bernard Picart’s engraving from the early eighteenth century of Memnon, son of Eos and Tithonus shows a young warrior in Egypt, looking into Aurora’s dawn light. He may be sat on his own sarcophagus too.

The two colossi at Al Bairat near Luxor in Egypt were known in classical times, and became popular motifs for ‘orientalist’ artists in the nineteenth century, several of whom show them in dramatic lighting.

Gustav W. Seitz’s Egypt: the Statues of Memnon, seen here as a colour lithograph of his original watercolour, is highly atmospheric, and an excellent demonstration of the moon illusion.

The colours in Charles Vacher’s watercolour of The Statues of the Memnons (1864) are superb.

Finally, Albert Zimmermann’s oil painting of The Memnon Statues captures the heat haze, and a snake moving through the water.