Portrait of Napoleon III (Winterhalter)

This 1853 oil-on-canvas state portrait of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870, was painted by the German court portraitist Franz Xaver Winterhalter and measures 240 by 155 centimeters. It shows the emperor in a general's uniform beneath a fictive royal cloak, holding the hand-of-justice scepter in his right hand and resting his left on the ceremonial sword known as the Joyeuse, with the Legion of Honor's regalia on his chest and the Tuileries Palace visible in the background. The original was exhibited at the 1855 Paris World's Fair Salon but was destroyed with the Tuileries Palace itself in a fire set during the suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871. Because the French state commissioned roughly 540 painted copies between 1855 and 1870 to furnish official buildings, the composition survives today only through these reproductions. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/