13 - “Small Gifts Foster Friendship”

Summary

This chapter examines a tiny copy of Fleury Richard’s painting Madame de la Vallière Carmalite (1806) made by Napoleon’s stepdaughter-cum-sister-in-law, Hortense de Beauharnais (1783–1837), from the intertwined perspectives of gift exchange, amateur art practice, and post-revolutionary politics. Mounted on a toothpick case and gifted by Hortense to her brother Eugène after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire, when both were exiled from France, this miniature was one of many seemingly inconsequential items Hortense gave to friends and family throughout her life. Following Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift and relying on a close reading of Hortense’s correspondence, the chapter first demonstrates that the exchange of such small objects carried a strategic value within the culture of sensibility that permeated elite social networks in early nineteenth-century Europe, one to which amateur artworks were particularly well suited. It then suggests that as self-referential signs, amateur artworks also had the potential to carry complex meanings about their makers. Ultimately, the chapter argues that through its miniaturization, amateur reproduction, and exchange as a sentimental gift, Richard’s picture became a politically shrewd symbol of Hortense’s identity in exile.