The Consuls Installed at the Tuileries, Paris, Antique Madou Lithograph, 1827

An original antique lithograph from Jean-Baptiste Madou's Vie de Napoléon, printed at Brussels in 1827. The sheet is lettered "INSTAL.on DU GOUV.t CONSULAIRE AUX TUILERIES." in open capitals above the image. The long front of the palace, with its domed central pavilion at the left and high roofed wings running to the right, fills the background, with town houses beyond. Before it ranks of infantry stand with shouldered muskets and a flag. Right of center Napoleon on a white horse reviews a line of infantry in bicornes, a mounted officer on a dark horse rides forward at the left beside drummers, and mounted staff officers, one in a turban, wait at the right.

The caption below the image reads: "A la suite d'une revue militaire, les consuls environnés d'un brillant appareil s'établirent dans l'ancien sejour des rois." In English: "After a military review, the consuls, surrounded by brilliant ceremony, took up residence in the former abode of the kings."

Vie de Napoléon was published at Brussels in 1827 by the Lithographie royale de Jobard, éditeur propriétaire. Its title page describes a text written by a society of men of letters from new documents dictated and corrected by Napoleon himself on Saint Helena, with plates lithographed by Jean-Baptiste Madou (1796 to 1877) after the first painters of the French school. This plate belongs to the first volume.

The three consuls left the Luxembourg palace for the Tuileries on 19 February 1800 (30 Pluviôse, Year VIII), the move being marked by a review of troops before the palace. Bonaparte as First Consul took the former royal apartments, and the Tuileries remained his principal residence in Paris through the Consulate and the Empire. The palace itself was burned during the Paris Commune in 1871 and its ruins were later cleared.

A single sheet frames well in a plain dark molding with a wide mat.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.