Shortly after Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821 on the remote island of St Helena in the south Atlantic, his physician, Dr Francois Carlo Antommarchi, made a death mask.
On Antommarchi’s return to Europe, the plaster cast was reproduced in bronze and other materials. This electro-type copy was once the property of Alexander Meyrick Broadley (1847-1916), a noted collector of Napoleana. Following Broadley’s death, it was sold to Lord Curzon, who in turn bequeathed it in 1926 to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.