| The Wedding of Napoleon and Marie Louise | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Georges Rouget |
| Year | 1810 |
| Type | Oil on canvas, history painting |
| Dimensions | 185 cm × 182 cm (73 in × 72 in) |
| Location | Palace of Versailles, Versailles |
The Wedding of Napoleon and Marie Louise (French: Mariage de Napoléon Ier et de Marie-Louise) is an 1810 history painting by the French artist Georges Rouget.
It depicts the wedding ceremony between Napoleon, Emperor of France and Marie Louise the daughter of the Austrian Emperor Francis I. [1] [2] The ceremony took place on 2 April 1810 in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Napoleon had divorced his first wife Josephine in order to remarry in search of an heir and a dynastic marriage with the House of Habsburg.[3]
The couple had already been married by proxy in Vienna with the bride's uncle Archuke Charles standing in for Napoleon. After entering France and meeting her husband for the first time, the couple went through both a civil ceremony and then this religious one, performed by Cardinal Joseph Fesch. Various figures of the Bonaparte family are depicted in the scene including Lucien Bonaparte, Jérôme Bonaparte, Letizia Bonaparte, Julie Bonaparte, Elisa Bonaparte, Pauline Bonaparte, Caroline Bonaparte, Hortense de Beauharnais, Eugène de Beauharnais, Joachim Murat and Camillo Borghese. The painting is now in the collection of the Palace of Versailles.[4]
