Her mother, Julie Clary, chose not to follow her husband to Naples and Spain, preferring to live with her daughters, Charlotte and Zenaide in her mansion at Mortefontaine. They divided their time between their quiet home and grand festivities at the Imperial Court.
After the fall of the Empire, when her father left for the United States of America, the political destiny of the Napoleonides forced her into a wandering life between Frankfurt and Brussels, the United States and England before she finally settled in Florence and Rome.
Her strong, likeable personality opened doors to a cultivated cosmopolitan society in which she was much admired. In Brussels she studied under David. All her life she mixed with artists, particularly those working in the two Italian cities in the second quarter of the 19th century.
This exhibition presents her sketchbooks of drawings and watercolours, now in the Museo Napoleonico in Rome. Alongside numerous works by Charlotte herself it includes drawings by artists she knew (Bartolomeo Pinelli, Léopold Robert, Michel Stapleaux, François Granet, Charles Müller, Charles Doussault, Edouard Odier, Nicolas-Didier Boguet, Samuele Jesi…) and even members of her family or enlightened amateurs who regularly attended her salon.
These particularly significant works from the Romantic movement of 1820-1840, contextualised by personal mementoes and objets d'art belonging to the Bonaparte family, give a glimpse of the various stages in the life of Princess Charlotte, and the tribulations brought not only by her exile but by the early death of her husband, her cousin, Napoleon-Louis.
This exhibition was first presented at the Museo Napoleonico in Rome, from 5 February to 30 May
2010, and then at the Musée Napoléon on the island of Elba from 15 June to 30 September 2010.
