This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Antoine-Jean Gros was born in 1771 and would go on to become one of the most significant artists of the Napoleonic era. It was Gros above all others who captured Le petit caporal both as he climbed to power and in his pomp.

After Napoleon’s final defeat, Gros rose to even greater eminence under the restored Bourbon monarchy. Nevertheless, he remains an undervalued figure and while his huge paintings of the Napoleonic adventure hang in the Louvre and in Versailles they are routinely dismissed as works of bombast and propaganda.

The painter and the future emperor first met in Milan in 1796. Gros, who trained with Jacques-Louis David, the premier artist in France and the great image maker for its Revolution, had failed to win the Prix de Rome — the scholarship for painters to study in Italy — but went there regardless. He travelled ostensibly to see the fabled works of art but also on a tip-off that he had become a person of interest to the revolutionaries and that putting some distance between himself and France would be prudent.

He worked initially as a jobbing portraitist among the French expat community and in this capacity was introduced to Josephine de Beauharnais, then in the early stages of her affair with Napoleon. She adopted the painter and took him in her carriage to Milan and her rendezvous with Napoleon, who was then busy conquering northern Italy as commander-in-chief of the French army.

At that moment he had just won a celebrated victory over the Austrians at Arcola, during which, in a foolhardy display of bravado, he stood at the head of his troops and led them over the bridge across the Alpone river.

The incident was too good for Gros to pass over and he painted the portrait of the coming man with Napoleon so fizzing with nervous energy that the only way he could be persuaded to remain still was for Josephine to take him on her lap and caress him into stillness. The resulting portrait, made from rapid sketches, both established Gros’s name and added extra glamour to Napoleon’s. It also yoked the two men in public consciousness.

By 1804 things were different. Napoleon was no longer a dashing general but the ruler of an expanded France and on the verge of crowning himself emperor. As a parvenu he needed to cement his position and one way to do it was through paintings that exalted his exploits.

For the Salon that year, Gros produced a monumental canvas showing Napoleon visiting stricken French soldiers during the Egyptian campaign. The Plague House at Jaffa, as the painting came to be known, depicts Napoleon touching the bubo in the armpit of one sufferer, a gesture that not only recalled the “King’s touch” — the magic of royalty by which anointed monarchs were said to cure scrofula — but showed Napoleon’s courage and care for his men.

As a parvenu he needed to cement his position and one way to do it was through paintings that exalted his exploits

Except that in reality, after the visit, Napoleon had also ordered his medics to give the worst afflicted soldiers an overdose of laudanum so they would not slow down his movements or infect further troops. Fortuitously, the dosage had an unexpected curative effect on many of the men, but Napoleon’s cold-bloodedness seems to have stuck unconsciously in Gros’s mind and when he painted the sick men he made some of them so monumental that they belong to a race of giants. His sympathy was with the sufferers.

This aspect of the painting was not seen at the time and it was a triumph at the Salon, one repeated with another supposedly propagandist exercise, Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau, 1808.

In this canvas, the Emperor surveyed the carnage after the battle, in which 50,000 men died or were wounded, and is shown declaring that if the world’s rulers could see such a scene they would be less avid for battle. Again, however, although Napoleon is at the centre of the composition, it is the victims surrounding him that are Gros’s real subject and their suffering — mad with pain or frozen in death — makes the Emperor’s piety malign.

It is unlikely Gros understood that he was subverting the ostensible message, but the ambivalence reflected his conflicted personality. He had a break-down at the grave of a fellow painter, Girodet, when he accused himself of setting the French school a bad example by abandoning David’s Classicism for the showier Romanticism.

Without Napoleon as the subject of his art his painting became anodyne

And although the Bourbons granted him the title of baron, he remained susceptible to the bullying of David — then in exile in Brussels — and unable to square his gifts for colour and movement with his master’s example.

Without Napoleon as the subject of his art — whatever his real feelings towards him — his painting became anodyne, and he knew it. It all became unbearable; and while Napoleon ended his days on a speck of rock in the Atlantic, Gros’s end was even more bathetic.

In June 1835 he drowned himself at Meudon-sur-Seine, in a stream off the river. A suicide note was reportedly found in his hatband at the scene. It read: “Tired of life and abandoned by the things that rendered it supportable, I have resolved to part with it.”

The message, tragic enough, only hints at the extent of his despair: the water in which he killed himself was just three feet deep, little more than a puddle. Yet so determined was he to die that he forced his head under and kept it there.