Napoléon Ier à Fontainebleau le 31 mars 1814

Delaroche's Napoleon at Fontainebleau from 1841 depicts the emperor after his first abdication on April 6, 1814, seated alone in the palace that had been his imperial residence—a subject of concentrated historical melancholy that made it one of his most celebrated images. The composition shows Napoleon in an armchair, face in hand, the papers of abdication on the table before him, in a posture of total defeat and exhausted resignation. The work appealed to the Bonapartist nostalgia that pervaded French political culture during the July Monarchy, presenting the fallen emperor not as a villain but as a tragic figure of heroic magnitude brought low by fortune. Delaroche's ability to focus the full drama of the Napoleonic era into a single figure in a single room demonstrated his mastery of the intimate historical narrative over the panoramic battle-piece tradition.

The dejected emperor is rendered with psychological intensity, Delaroche's precise technique capturing the contrast between Napoleon's former glory and his present humiliation.