Shop art print and framed art Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa by Antoine-Jean Gros
Subjects : History
Keywords : 19th century, Neo-Classicism, column, illness, man, plague
(Ref : 123902) © RMN /Thierry Le Mage
Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa by Antoine-Jean Gros(Ref : 123902) © RMN /Thierry Le Mage
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Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Ja... OF Antoine-Jean Gros
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Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa
Bonaparte visiting the plague victims in Jaffa is a painting by Antoine-Jean Gros dating from 1804, commissioned by Napoleon to depict an episode in the Egyptian campaign. The historical reality of the scene depicted in this painting, and in particular Bonaparte's gesture, is disputed. However, Bonaparte's visit to the plague victims is attested to by Desgenettes, but the facts are different: Bonaparte, "finding himself in a narrow and very crowded room, [he] helped to lift or rather to carry the hideous corpse of a soldier whose tattered clothes were soiled by the spontaneous opening of an enormous abscessed bubo". This scene was the subject of an early sketch by Gros, now in the Louvre. Bonaparte therefore took even greater risks than touching a closed bubo.
This painting was produced in 1804, and exhibited for the first time on 18 September at the Paris Salon. Gros' work was guided by Dominique Vivant Denon, who had taken part in Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, and who went on to become director of the Louvre Museum. The painting depicts Napoleon during a scene that took place in Jaffa in 1799, during which he motivates his troops and approaches and touches patients suffering from a plague epidemic that was raging in the army.
A sketch of this painting was created in 1802, entitled Bonaparte, General-in-Chief of the Army of the East, touches a pestilential tumour while visiting the plague-stricken in the hospital at Jaffa, and is now kept at the Musée Condé in [...]
This artwork is a painting from the classical period. It belongs to the neoclassicism style.
« Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa » is kept at Louvre, Paris, France.