Why it matters
David, Napoleon's official painter, turned the coronation at Notre-Dame into a painting almost 10 metres wide and over 6 metres tall. Commissioned orally by Napoleon in 1804, it took him from December 1805 to January 1808 to complete in a former chapel near the Sorbonne.
Did you know?
- It was exhibited at the Salon of 1808.
- American entrepreneurs commissioned a full-size replica, which David painted from memory and only finished in 1822, in exile in Brussels.
- The painting hung at Versailles for decades before moving to the Louvre in 1889; the replica now hangs at Versailles.
Based on the Wikipedia article The Coronation of Napoleon (CC BY-SA 4.0).
