Word: napoleonism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tenth Street. But by the end of the '60s, his virtues had to an extent rebounded on his reputation. His astounding skill as a traditional, realistic draftsman looked vaguely suspect to some critics. The ironical love with which he raided the beaux-arts tradition for such images as Napoleon, a reworking of David's 1812 portrait of the hero, struck them as literary but in the wrong way: not philosophical enough, unconcerned (unlike Johns and Rauschenberg) with the semantics and sign structure of art. The new celebrity artist was the cool and silent Andy Warhol...
...Rome in 1806 with a scholarship he had won to the French Academy there. He was 26, already known as a Parisian prodigy; he came to a town whose social and intellectual life seems to have struck him as a mere echo of what he had known in Napoleon's Paris. A few weeks after settling into the Villa Medici, he wrote to his fiancee in Paris, Julie Forestier: "I cordially loathe Rome ... it is very beautiful, but, in a few words, everything is provincial compared to the great city of Paris." Rome slowly seduced him. Soon afterward Mile...
...Aymar, the only survivor of the seven children she had borne. With wit and unsentimental precision she recollected the exact details of a world that had vanished as if it never existed. What delights today's reader, though, is less the firsthand history (from the 1770s until Napoleon's return from Elba in 1815) than the self-portrait that slowly emerges. The Memoirs finally trace a cameo profile of aristocracy viewed from its better side and well deserving of the definition "grace under pressure...
Obediently, Madame returned to France with her husband in 1796, after the establishment of the Directorate. "I felt no pleasure at returning," she wrote, then complained no more. As Napoleon rose to Emperor, she settled down to a Frenchwoman's perennial business-being charming where it does the most good, come revolution or restoration...
Envoy of Charm. When her husband lost his post as prefect in Brussels, she composed her charms and went to Napoleon. He "placed his beautifully shaped hand on my arm" and she went home with the prefecture of Amiens. Sitting on a sofa next to King William I of The Netherlands, she assiduously promoted the diplomatic career of a son-in-law. She knew Great Men in her time, from the Duke of Wellington to Alexander Hamilton, and she leaves a delicate but firm impression that none of them-kings and emperors included -was quite safe in her company...