LOOKING FOR NAPOLEON IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
Portrait of Napoleon’s close friend Jean Lannes at the University of Texas’s Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Click here.
Miscellany
Napoleon on Camelback in the Musée Fesch
After seeing the photo of me riding an elephant, one of this blog’s readers asked if Napoleon had ridden a camel during his Egyptian Campaign (1798). Yes, Melanie! Here’s a photo I took of a small bronze statue of the Man himself on camelback. It’s displayed in the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio, Corsica, Napoleon’s hometown. …
Finding Napoleon in Southeast Asia
In November, 2012, I took a break from writing about Napoleon to travel in Southeast Asia, visiting Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. It was primarily a bicycling trip, and, I assure you, my equipment was higher quality than what you see above in the photo snapped in the picturesque fields of Vietnam. Here’s another method …
Darwin, Tortoises and St Helena
The recent death of the Galapagos Islands’ iconic tortoise, Lonesome George, sent me scrambling for my copy of The Voyage of the HMS Beagle. Sure enough, Charles Darwin, who made the Galapagos famous, had also stopped at St Helena Island. He arrived there on July 8, 1836, five and half years into his six-year trip …
Happy Birthday, Empress Josephine!
Napoleon’s first wife Josephine was born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie in Martinique on June 23, 1763. If you could ask her, however, she’d probably lie and tell you her birth year was 1767, which was what she wrote on her marriage documents. Napoleon also lied on those documents, saying he, too, had …
Encyclopedia Britannica Goes Fully Digital
The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that the 2010 publication is its last print edition. First published in 1768, the year before Napoleon Bonaparte’s birth, this venerable reference source is going totally digital. Although I love hard-copy books, the announcement wouldn’t normally bother me. After all, the internet is a practical way to keep information up-to-date …
Napoleon Portrait Painted by a Woman
Today, I visited the “Royalists to Romantics” exhibit at the National Museum of the Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. The collection of seventy paintings on loan from the Louvre, Versailles, and other French museums were all produced by women between 1750 and 1850, a time when women artists were marginalized. One of the …
Pushcart Prize Nomination
This fall, The Delmarva Review published my short story, “Mrs. Morrisette.” Now, they’ve nominated it for inclusion in the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology. According to the Pushcart website, “The Pushcart Prize – Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America.” Next April, I’ll find …
Napoleonic Historical Society Conference
Last weekend, my husband Bert and I attended the Napoleonic Historical Society’s annual conference. Held this year in Baltimore, Maryland, the agenda included lectures on Napoleonic topics as well as NHS president Sheperd Paine’s excellent overview of the War of 1812, in which the Baltimore region played a part. (Francis Scott Key wrote the Star …
Goya’s Portrait of French General Guye
Last weekend at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, I came across Francisco Goya’s stunning painting of the Napoleonic general Nicolas Philippe Guye. Guye had been wounded at Austerlitz and later served as aide-de-camp to Napoleon’s older brother Joseph. In 1810, when Goya painted this portrait, Guye was governor of Seville and Joseph …