Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801), painted by Jacques-Louis David. Walker Art Gallery, London.

Despite the heroic scene shown, Napoleon did not in reality lead his troops through the Alps. In terms of scale alone, Napoleon and his horse dominate the pictorial plane. Château de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison. Some find it stiff and lifeless, proof of David’s ineptness at capturing movement. Certainly David idolized the man. Taking the point further, if with that outstretched arm and billowing cloak, his body seems to echo the landscape, the reverse might equally hold true, that it is the landscape that echoes him, and is ultimately mastered by his will.

1850. Despite an inauspicious start to the campaign, the Austrian forces were driven back to Marengo after nearly a month. 1801 The event depicted in the painting: Napoleon crosses the Alps, leading the French army in the war outside of France’s borders on the way to conquer Austria. Completed in four months, from October 1800 to January 1801, it signals the dawning of a new century. He ordered three more versions to be painted; a fifth was also produced which stayed in David’s studio.

Napoleon liked David’s portrait so much he had four copies made, but he soon turned to a new generation of artists to visualize the Napoleonic legend — and they forged a new dramatic style that came to be know as Romanticism. Napoleon Crossing the Alps (also known as Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass or Bonaparte Crossing the Alps) is the title given to the five versions of an oil on canvas equestrian portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte painted by the French artist Jacques-Louis David between 1801 and 1805.

The candles are burned down, the clock shows four in the morning, his pen and paper are thrown down on the desk, everything is designed to imply that he has just spent all night working on the Code Civil. Raised arms are often found in David’s work, though this one is physically connected with the setting, echoing the slope of the mountain ridge.

. He was the one who settled on the idea of an equestrian portrait: “calme sur un cheval fougueux” (calm on a fiery horse), were his instructions to the artist.

And David duly obliged. What better way, after all, to demonstrate Napoleon’s ability to wield power with sound judgment and composure.

Napoleon crossing the alps. Girodet, The Sleep of Endymion.

The picture’s message is clear: the military leader is also a powerful statesman, administrator and legislator, whose capacity for work is unparalleled.”David continued to serve Napoleon as his political image was transformed into a larger-than-life super-hero character. It was one of those “photo-ops” that politicians know how to manipulate (the President visiting troops on Christmas, or paying a personal visit to families hit hard by disaster) — and Gros knew how to milk it for all it was worth!

David seems to suggest that this man, whose achievements will be celebrated for centuries to come, can do just about anything.Inscriptions reading “Bonaparte,” “Hannibal,” and “Karolus Magnus”(detail), Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon was obviously flattered.

Some snigger at its overblown, action-packed, cliff-hanging momentousness, with shades of “Hi ho Silver, away!” Some have it down as a sort of beginning of the end moment in David’s career, before he officially became Napoleon’s artist-lackey. Reflecting the breadth of Napoleon’s European conquests, one was hung in Madrid, two in Paris, and one in Milan.In 1801 David was awarded the position of Premier Peintre (First Painter) to Napoleon. The overall effect is to stabilize the figure of Napoleon.The landscape is treated as a setting for the hero, not as a subject in itself.

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