NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821 while in exile on the South Atlantic island of St. Helen. For much of the intervening time, it has been alleged that he was poisoned by his British captors. These allegations gained credence when analysis of his hairs showed arsenic to be present above normal levels.

Arsenic has long been a byword for poison and a favourite of 19th-century prisoners, who could easily obtain it from sources such as rat poisons and flypapers, or simply from pharmacists. In the 19th-century, symptoms of arsenic poisoning could easily be confused with cholera. Arsenic had a variety of uses at the time in cosmetics, embalming, weed and pigments. Copper arsenite ( C4HAsO3), otherwise known as Scheele's Green, was a pigment discovered in the late 18th-century that was popular with artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Edouard Manet. In the 19th-century, it was used as a colouring for wallpaper. Green was Napoleon's favourite colour; that's the reason why the background in the painting is green. I painted an intricate pattern because he was said to be a man of wonders. Over a century after his death, a piece of green wallpaper taken from his room not long after he died was shown to contain arsenic; it's hard to see but I wrote the formula for Scheele's Green on the green background).

In 1892, an Italian doctor, named Bartolomeo Gosio, established that under damp conditions moulds could release volatile arsenic compounds from Scheele's Green. At the time the volatile arsenic compound was thought to be the highly poisonous arsane [As(CH3)3]. Death from acute arsenite poisoning can take anything from 2 hours to 4 days; for most, the misery lasts 24 hours. It is now known that it is not very poisonous, and the most likely cause of Napoleon's death is thought to be cancer of the stomach. His death did not come suddenly. For months, Napoleon suffered from abdominal pain, nausea, night sweats and fever. When he was not constipated, he was assailed by diarrhea; he lost weight. He complained of headaches, weak legs and discomfort. His speech became blurred. The night sweats left his drenched. His gums and lips and nails were colourless. Briefly, even he got it in his head that he was being poisoned.

Although this has been proved already, there must have been a time of speculation around his death: was it a stomach ulcer or poison? This piece shows the perspective from that time period; the X on Napoleon's eye stands for his death and the question marks on the wallpaper stand for the people's doubt.

FUN FACTS ABOUT NAPOLEON:

• At the height of his power, Napoleon developed the habit of dressing up as a lower-class person and wandering around the streets of Paris. His aim was to find out what the men on the streets thought of him and he reportedly quizzed random passers-by about their Emperor's merits;

• It is said that Napoleon carried a vial of poison, attached to a cord he wore around his neck, that could be swiftly downed should he ever be captured. Apparently, he did eventually imbibe the poison in 1814, after his exile to Elba, but its potency was diminished and it only succeeded in making him violently ill.