Princeton University Art Museum Acquires Self-Portrait by Charlotte Bonaparte

16 January 2024

This self-portrait by Charlotte Bonaparte, a niece of Napoleon, was painted when she was about twenty, and shows what her training had given her by that age

This self-portrait by Charlotte Bonaparte, a niece of Napoleon, was painted when she was about twenty, and shows what her training had given her by that age. The daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, she drew and painted from childhood and studied in her teens with Jacques-Louis David and with Louis-Léopold Robert. In the early 1820s she spent three years in the United States with her father, where she made a large number of landscape drawings and paintings, one of which lies open on her lap here.

The picture enters a collection at Princeton where the work of women artists, past and present, is a stated priority.