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Rare satirical portrait, issued soon after Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814, signed “J. Kay 1814.”
At first glance the engraving is a conventional left-facing bust, but the likeness is in fact a mosaic of emblematic elements that cast the fallen emperor as a figure of predation and ruin. His familiar military bicorne is replaced by a crouching imperial eagle, the embodiment of French aggression now reduced to a mere hat. Across his neck a shaded band marked “Red Sea” evokes oceans of blood in which his armies have “drowned.” The surface of Napoleon's face is gruesomely composed of contorted corpses—“carcases of the unhappy victims to his cruel ambition”—turning his countenance into a ledger of the human cost of his wars.
Kay extends the allegory into Napoleon’s uniform. The right-hand epaulette is not braid but a mailed fist bearing rings lettered “R E P S,” which collectively clutch at the rectangles symbolizing the Rhenish Confederation, suggesting the coercive grip he maintained over Germany’s small states. Below the shoulders, the torso transforms into a map of central Europe, its outline traced by the Rhine, Elbe, and Oder and studded with crosses that mark 1813 battlefields such as Lützen, Bautzen, Culm, Katzbach, and Leipzig. At the heart of this patchwork sits a spider spinning an expanding web—an image of Napoleonic domination—now torn apart by the Allies whose “vigilance” the spider is said to represent. Together, these components shrink the once-mighty emperor to a monstrous composite of bloodshed, failed conquest, and shattered alliances, fit only to govern the tiny island to which he has been exiled.
Kay’s design drew on a “hieroglyphic portrait” first published in Berlin earlier in 1814 by the brothers Moritz, August, Friedrich, and Wilhelm Henschel, but he adapted it for British audiences with the pointed new title emphasizing Elba. Its popularity was immediate: London printer George Smeeton reproduced a closely related version at the centre of his broadside Memoirs of Buonaparte, His Imperial Family, Great Officers of State, and Great Military Officers (1814), a three-series compendium of scurrilous character sketches described by historian Alexander Meyrick Broadley as “a tissue of atrocious libels.” Retaining almost verbatim Kay’s explanatory caption, Smeeton ensured that even readers unfamiliar with allegorical caricature could decode every barb. Circulating widely in the months following Napoleon’s downfall, the print served Allied propaganda by portraying the emperor’s empire as a fragile web of violence now definitively swept away—leaving its architect to brood in obscure exile on Elba.
Rarity
The engraving is rare on the market.
