NEW WORLD; CLEAR EYES

Napoleon’s armies came searching for resisters who sought to reinstate the Bourbon monarchy, Anne Marguérite Joséphine Henriette Rouillé de Marigny; the Baroness Hyde de Neuville (1771–1849) escaped with her husband on a ferry. Standing along the deck of the boat slowly moving upstream from her husband’s familial home, La Charité sur Loire, she painted. The watercolor and ink drawing of the lost estate implies a resilience that would hold her in good stead over the years to come. In due course, her husband was arrested for conspiring with enemies of the emperor. When her attempts to disprove the charges failed, in 1805 she pursued the French armies amid raging battles across Germany and Austria, accompanied only by her chambermaid, seeking an audience with Napoleon himself. She pleaded her husband’s cause to whomever would listen, painting