Joséphine de Beauharnais so captivated the socially awkward Napoleon that, despite eventually annulling their marriage and remarrying, he is said to have died with her name on his lips in 1821. Their relationship faltered when she was unable to produce an heir. She entered the marriage as an older woman at 32. She was a widow with two children and a complex past, having survived prison and poverty during the French Revolution as a minor aristocrat.

Napoleon, sexually inexperienced and infatuated, was undeterred by her background or by her famously blackened teeth, stained from childhood sugar consumption in her plantation home on Martinique.

Joséphine was Empress of the French for six years, until the annulment of their marriage in 1810. During that time, as Napoleon’s consort, she also held the title of Queen of Italy.

In this painting, Joséphine is represented as a scarlet ibis, a bird native to Martinique, with a blackened beak. The mural in the background is taken from a piece I found behind a daybed in the 19th-century collection of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. It was created by Dufour & Leroy between 1830 and 1831.