Antoine-Jean Gros

• 1. Introduction

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  Antoine-Jean Gros was born in Paris on the 16th of March 1771, the son of two painters, in a city on the edge of revolution. By the time he died on the 25th of June 1835, he had painted the most celebrated image of Napoleon Bonaparte that France had ever produced, trained a generation of artists who would reshape European painting, and drowned himself in a river outside Paris after reading the reviews of his final exhibition. His life runs in almost perfect parallel with the arc of Napoleon's France. He rose with it, flourished inside it, and came apart after it fell. The questions his story raises are not just about art. They are about what happens to a painter when the world he painted ceases to exist, and whether the art that survives its occasion is still the art the painter intended to make.

• 2. Two Painters, One Studio

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  At the age of six, Gros was already learning to draw from his father, Jean-Antoine Gros, a miniature painter. His mother, Pierrette-Madeleine-Cecile Durand, also worked as a painter. Art was not an aspiration in the Gros household; it was the furniture. Towards the close of 1785, the teenage Gros made his own choice and entered the Paris studio of Jacques-Louis David, the most powerful painter in France. He was not passive about it. He attended assiduously, while also continuing classes at the College Mazarin. The death of his father in 1791, whose finances had been badly damaged by the Revolution, stripped away whatever safety net remained. Gros was now on his own. He competed for the grand prix in 1792 and failed to win it. He painted portraits of members of the National Convention on the recommendation of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but as the Revolution grew more violent, he left France entirely in 1793 and crossed into Italy. The man who had trained under David would spend years in Genoa before the encounter that would define his career.

• 3. Bonaparte at the Bridge

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  Genoa was where Gros supported himself by painting portraits of whoever would sit for him. He traveled to Florence and returned, and it was in Genoa that he met Josephine de Beauharnais. Following her to Milan, he was received by her husband, Napoleon Bonaparte. What came next was the painting Bonaparte at the Pont d'Arcole, depicting the French commander at the Battle of Arcole in 1796. The canvas is modest in size, 130 by 94 centimeters, but its effect was not modest at all. It brought Gros to public attention and secured Napoleon's patronage directly. Bonaparte rewarded him with the post of inspecteur aux revues, which let Gros travel with the army. In 1797, he was charged with selecting works of art to be taken as spoils for the Louvre. Gros was no longer just a portraitist surviving in a foreign city. He had attached himself to the most consequential military and political figure in Europe, and that attachment would shape every canvas he made for the next decade.

• 4. Painting Plague and Power

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  Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa debuted at the Salon of 1804 and is now among the largest canvases in the Louvre, measuring 715 by 523 centimeters. It depicts Bonaparte in Jaffa reaching out to touch one of his soldiers infected with the bubonic plague, showing no fear of the disease. According to P. Jill Morse, Napoleon commissioned the painting specifically to counter British propaganda. That propaganda centered on two episodes of the Egyptian campaign of 1798-1800: first, his order to massacre Turkish prisoners; second, his order to poison French soldiers suffering from the plague so they would not slow his army's withdrawal from Syria. The painting answered both accusations with a single image of Napoleon as compassionate healer. Morse adds that Gros was probably also using the disease as a metaphor for the vanity of Napoleon and his First Empire. The source notes that Bonaparte did in fact visit the pesthouse, but later ordered the poisoning of roughly fifty of his plague-infected men with laudanum before withdrawing from Syria. A study for his painting of the Battle of Nazareth, now in the Musee d'Arts de Nantes, had already won a prize offered by the consuls in 1802. The full commission was cancelled, reportedly because Napoleon resented the prominence given to General Jean-Andoche Junot in the composition.

• 5. Eylau and Its Aftermath

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  On the 22nd of October 1808, Napoleon made Gros a member of the Legion of Honour, following the Salon of 1808 where Gros had exhibited his painting of the Battle of Eylau. The full title records the exact date of that battle: the 9th of February 1807. The version now in the Louvre measures just over 104 by 145 centimeters; a larger version hangs at Versailles, where the Battle of Aboukir from 1806 and the Napoleon accepts the surrender of Madrid from 1810 also reside. After David left Paris in 1815, Gros gained many more pupils. Under the Bourbon Restoration he accumulated institutional titles: member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, member of the Order of Saint Michael. In 1824, King Charles X granted him the title of baron. But by 1810, his paintings Madrid and Napoleon at the Pyramids had begun to suggest, in Gros's own artistic choices, that Napoleon had left him behind. The world of martial triumph that had given his work its subject matter was already receding. Francis I and Charles V, shown at the Salon in 1812 and now in the Louvre, found considerable success, but the momentum was shifting.

• 6. The Painter Vigee Le Brun Knew

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  Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun had known Gros since he was seven years old and had painted his portrait at that age, noting even then an artistic inclination in the child. When she returned to France she was surprised to find him a successful and famous painter, head of his own school. Her written account of him is unusually direct. She describes him as naturally impulsive, prone to intense feeling, and uncomfortable in crowds. In a crowded room he rarely spoke, but listened carefully and replied with a smile or a single well-chosen word. In private he was entirely different. Vigee Le Brun wrote that his conversation was fascinating precisely because he never expressed himself the way other men did, always finding unusual and powerful images for his thoughts. She put it this way: he painted with words. She was at her most specific about his final days. She had met him the day before his death in 1835 and noted him brooding over criticism he had received for Hercules and Diomedes, the painting he had shown at that year's Salon. His failure there, combined with his sense that Romanticism had overtaken everything he valued in painting, proved to be more than he could bear.

• 7. Legacy and a Sharp Remark

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  Gros inspired Eugene Delacroix, especially through his work in lithography. Both artists painted Napoleon, and their careers overlapped in time. But Gros's feelings about where painting was heading were not generous. He referred to Delacroix's Chios and Missolonghi as a massacre of art. That phrase, coming from the painter who had depicted the Plague Victims of Jaffa and the battlefield at Eylau, carries a particular weight. His work on the Apotheosis of Saint Genevieve at the Pantheon de Paris spanned from 1811 to 1824, and his portraits are held across major collections including the Louvre, the Palace of Versailles, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pushkin Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. G. Dargenty published a book on him in 1887 under the title Les Artistes celebres. Le Bon Gros. M. Delcluze included a notice of his life in Louis David et son temps. The 135-by-196-centimeter study for the Battle of Nazareth, now in Nantes, is a reminder that some of Gros's most carefully prepared projects were the ones that never came to full realization.