Joséphine de Beauharnais (1763-1814), Empress of the French as the first wife of Napoléon I, was one of the most consequential jewellery clients in European history. Her decade of patronage between her marriage to Bonaparte in 1796 and her divorce in 1809, together with her continued buying as a divorced empress until her death in 1814, drove the development of Empire-style jewellery and underwrote the rise of Marie-Étienne Nitot's Paris workshop, the direct ancestor of the modern Maison Chaumet.

Early life

Born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie on the French colony of Martinique in 1763, she came to Paris in 1779 and married Alexandre de Beauharnais, an aristocratic officer guillotined during the Terror. The young widow Beauharnais survived the Revolution, moved in Directoire society and married the rising general Napoléon Bonaparte in 1796. He renamed her Joséphine on the day of their marriage.

Coronation and Empire jewels

The coronation of Napoléon and Joséphine at Notre-Dame on 2 December 1804 was the public event that fixed the Empire style of jewellery in European memory. For the ceremony Joséphine wore a parure of diamonds and pearls supplied by Marie-Étienne Nitot, including the so-called pearl tiara that has been documented and reissued in various forms by Chaumet over two centuries. Her coronation crown, an open circlet of pearls and diamonds, and the great diamond necklace and earrings of the parure became the templates for the next decade of European court jewellery.

Patronage of Nitot

Joséphine, together with Napoléon, was Nitot's principal client. The Empress commissioned suites of cameos, parures of coloured stones and diamonds, tiaras of laurel and oak leaves, and the so-called Lavoisier and Leuchtenberg parures that are among the best documented Empire jewels. Many of the pieces survive, divided across the collections of the Swedish royal family, the Norwegian royal family, the Beauharnais and Leuchtenberg branches, the Louvre and various private collections. The Lavoisier emeralds, in particular, have been extensively studied because they passed by descent from Joséphine through her son Eugène de Beauharnais and Princess Augusta of Bavaria into the Swedish line, where the tiara is still occasionally worn at court events in Stockholm.

Cameo and antique taste

Joséphine had a marked personal taste for antique and antique-revival cameos and intaglios. Her commissions to Nitot routinely incorporated Roman and Hellenistic cameos in cornelian, sardonyx and chalcedony into modern gold mountings, and she was an active buyer in the Paris cameo market for two decades. This taste set the European fashion for antique cameo parures that lasted into the 1830s.

Significance

For the gem and jewellery trade Joséphine's importance is twofold. She is the patron most responsible for the codification of the Empire style, with its laurel wreaths, palmettes, classical cameos and architectural symmetry. And the surviving documentation of her commissions, much of it in the Chaumet archive, gives the trade an unusually complete picture of how a major early-nineteenth-century court collection was assembled, broken up and dispersed over generations. Few other historical clients are as well documented across both archive and surviving objects.