Napoleon and Marie Walewska 3 (Original)

Artist: William Francis Marshall
Medium: Pen & Ink Wash on Board
Size: 22" x 14" (550mm x 350mm)
Date: 1975
Code: MarshallNap001

This is the unique original Pen & Ink Wash by William Francis Marshall.

Countess Marie Walewska, (7 December 1786, Brodne - 11 December 1817, Paris) was a Polish countess. In 1806, aged twenty and married to Count Athenasius Walewski, she met French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and became his mistress.

The relationship continued through Napoleon's divorce and remarriage to Marie Louise of Austria. Napoleon acknowledged Marie Walewski's son, Alexandre Joseph Colonna-Walewski, born in 1810, as his illegitimate child.

In 1816, after Napoleon's defeat and the death of her first husband, Marie Walewski remarried Philippe Antoine d'Ornano. She died during childbirth in 1817.

• Artist Biography
  William Francis Marshall (1901 - 1980)
  Francis Marshall studied at Slade before entering the world of advertising illustration. In 1928 he began a 10-year relationship with Condé Nast, drawing for Vogue. In 1959 he wrote a successful book on drawing entitled Magazine Illustration.