Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), the Corsican artillery captain who became Emperor of France, held centre stage in the last great struggle between Britain and France. They were at war, in the main, from 1793 to 1815. The decades from his rise in the 1790s to his death in exile on remote St Helena in the South Atlantic coincided with the flowering of the satirical print in Britain, as the exhibits in this temporary exhibition bear out. Held to mark the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, it draws on the outstanding treasure trove of these merciless popular images held by the British Museum, which possesses some 1400 satires on Napoleon alone. Hence, as the exhibition’s title suggests, the story of Napoleon, and the lengthy war, was told against the background of the flourishing of caricature and the London print trade from the second half of the eighteenth century, when work by English engravers sold widely and was copied across Europe.
As the opening line to the fully illustrated catalogue for the show declares, the exhibition is ‘the story of the greatest ever self-made man … and of his struggle against a people he admired but who became his inveterate enemy’. Works displayed reflected Napoleon’s awareness of self-image and of the print as propaganda. They looked at how he was viewed in Britain while also looking at how the French viewed Britons, and at Britain’s self-image as an island apart from Europe. Issues of free speech and government intervention during a time of total war also featured among the 165 exhibits laid out in the Museum’s square-roomed galleries in the Burnett wing. Largely works on paper, mostly prints, but also drawings, paintings, sculpture, medals, pottery, and objects d’art, most of the exhibits were small in scale, bringing an intimate immediacy to the history.
They were displayed in 10 sections, with the show chronologically covering Bonaparte’s rise and fall. The first half of the exhibition chronicled his rise as young General to Emperor, with sections that individually focused on events in Egypt, on Bonaparte as Consul and peacemaker, and the threatened invasion of Britain. The second half of the exhibition covered the campaigns, from Trafalgar to Waterloo, with a final section that focused on Bonaparte after his defeat. The vivid prints, with fresh, vibrant colours, required no more than a simple presentation in glass cases: most were wall-mounted, or viewed looking down in the case of the smaller exhibits. Such display allowed each exhibit to speak vividly of the many facets to Bonaparte’s riveting progress.
James Gilray (1756–1815), the leading caricaturist of his time, and known as the father of the political cartoon, starred in the show, alongside other masterly satirists like Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), and Isaac Cruikshank (1764–1811) and his younger brother George Cruikshank (1792–1878). Bonaparte was of average height, being five foot, six inches tall but Gilray diminished Bonaparte, famously depicting the Monster of Europe as ‘Little Boney’: exaggeratedly small, held in the palm of George III’s hand, only visible through a spy glass.
Yet, while so contemptuously – and widely – represented, Bonaparte, who admired the British, enjoyed admirers, among them Sir Walter Scott who saw Bonaparte as ‘the greatest man of his time’, and whose biography of him was popular. Opening the show was a substantial bronze bust of Napoleon by Antonio Canova, which the British sympathiser, Lord Holland, displayed prominently in the garden of Holland House in Kensington. By the same token, anti-British satires, produced by Napoleon’s own efficient propaganda machine, were displayed. The French ridiculed English visitors who travelled eagerly to France, when the Treaty of Amiens brought brief peace in 1802, and in 1814 and 1815, mocking them for their gluttony, gauche behaviour, uncouth dress sense and clumsiness.
Most remarkable were 11 pocketbook-sized watercolours of the battlefield of Waterloo, including three long panoramas, which came from a private collection and were displayed publicly for the first time. Considered as the earliest known studies of the battlefield, these were sketched by an Irishman, Thomas Stoney, who is thought to have been one of the first of the many civilians to flock to Belgium to witness the aftermath of the battle on 18 June 1815. Battle tourists, like Stoney, came to see where Bonaparte’s advance across Europe ended. Stoney’s sketches, drawn just two or three days after the fighting stopped, depict the most famous sites of the battle: the farm of La Haye Sainte; the Chateau de Goumont, now known as Hougoumont; the buildings at Quatre Bras. These revealed the tight area in which the fierce fight took place. One shocking sketch shows the ground strewn with the bodies of fallen soldiers, stripped naked by scavengers.
Held in a gold mourning ring was a lock of Bonaparte’s hair, which reflected his charm. Betsy Balcombe (1802–1871) gave this to the collector Sir John Soane, who collected Napoleana. A fondness grew between Bonaparte and the Balcombe family, on whose estate he resided before moving into Longwood on St Helena. He gave a lock of his hair to each member of the Balcombe family on their departure from the island in 1818. Betsy’s father, Sir William Balcombe, subsequently became colonial treasurer of New South Wales in 1823, and died in Sydney in early 1829.
This exceptional presentation achieved so well two things. First, it showed how events were seen in their own time, most clearly underscoring Bonaparte’s position as a historical force, challenging monarchist Europe. Second, it illustrated instructively the strength of print culture and its role in shaping views of Napoleon. Of the numerous exhibitions held in 2015 to mark the bicentenary of Waterloo, this exhibition was outstanding.