The Empress Josephine

Prud’hon started to paint in a style that was entirely rooted in the 18th century. His subjects were taken from Antiquity, but sfumato and grace, the gentle folds of cloth and the idealized little faces of his girlish fairies show him to be one of the last elegiac representatives of the Rococo. We encounter him only rarely as a Neoclassical painter of the linear style, and if so, the mood of the end of the Rococo period is very evident. This is clear in the full-figure portrait of The Empress Josephine, in which the late 18th-century love of nature is still having its effect. The meditative gaze that the Empress is directing on to an antique urn touched the central nerve of the time.