Crowd in Front of the Tuileries Palace During the Wedding of Napoleon to Marie-Louise of Austria

Charles Percier

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing was a design for plate nine in the 1810 book, Description des cérémonies et des fêtes qui ont eu lieu pour le mariage de S.M. l'Empereur Napoléon avec S.A.I. Madame l'Archiduchesse Marie-Louise d'Autriche par Charles Percier et P.F.L. Fontaine (see: 65.602.3). The book details the marriage ceremony of Napoleon and Marie-Louise of Austria, and shows the emperor and empress on the great balcony of the Tuileries. The unfinished image is in the reverse of the print and differs in certain details from the plate engraved by Charles Normand (1765-1840) and Louis Pauquet (1759-after 1822).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art