Exhibition labels & didactics - National Gallery of Victoria

Baron François GÉRARD
French 1770–1837
Maria Laetitia Ramolino Bonaparte,
called Madame Mère
c. 1800–04
oil on canvas
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
Purchased with the aid of the Art Fund, 1988 NG 2461
Baron François Gérard was the major
portrait painter in France during the
Napoleonic era. This hieratic image of
Imperial matriarchy is one of three grand
portraits he painted of Napoleon’s Corsican
mother, Maria Laetitia Ramolino. In 1805,
shortly after his coronation as Emperor,
Napoleon conferred on his mother the title
‘Son Altesse Impériale, Madame Mère de
l’Empereur’ (Her Imperial Highness, Madame
Mother of the Emperor), an honour of which
she strongly disapproved, though she was
generally known as ‘Madame Mère’.
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