Panoramic wallpaper Imperial Palm . 1810

The original panoramic wallpaper features a few characters in costumes that seem to date from the beginning of the 18th century. The man (to the right of our visual) with his hand slipped under the jacket represents an emblematic posture of the Napoleonic period. Long before Napoleon, the painting already showed men of power with their hand slipped under the jacket, to symbolize weighting. Most of the official representations of Napoleon carried out under the Consulate and the Empire thus showed him in this posture in order to impose the idea of ​​a lenient emperor. Subsequently, the collective imagination associated this gesture with the image of Napoleon.

More broadly, this masculine posture was widely adopted at this time because it was considered elegant. According to the work "The rules of decorum and Christian civility" re-edited several times in the 18th century, it was indeed "... a failure to cross the arms over the chest, to intertwine them behind the back. , to let them hang nonchalantly, to swing them while walking, under the pretext of relief; [...] if one does not have a cane, neither sleeve, nor gloves, it is quite ordinary to put the right arm on the chest or on the stomach, while putting the hand in the opening of the jacket ”.