Bonaparte Crossing the Alps
Paul Delaroche (1797-1856) · 1848
A young general in a grey greatcoat sits on a mule that a peasant guide leads up a narrow path through the snow. The man is Napoleon Bonaparte crossing the Great Saint Bernard pass in May eighteen hundred, on his way to the victory of Marengo. His face is pinched with cold, his hand is tucked into his coat, and his eyes look ahead without expression. The guide, in a rough coat and a red cap, leans on his stick. Behind them the rock rises into mist, and a few soldiers can be made out on the path above.
Everyone who saw this picture in eighteen forty eight knew the painting it answered: Jacques-Louis David's Bonaparte on a rearing horse, cloak flying, painted half a century earlier. Delaroche went back to the sources and found that the First Consul had crossed the pass on a mule, led by a local guide, in bad weather. He painted that instead. Look at the handling of the snow and the wet rock, the mule's damp coat, the frayed edge of the greatcoat: this is history as reportage, precise and unheroic, and the sitter's stillness is the whole drama. The picture is signed and dated at the lower left.
Delaroche painted the canvas in Paris in eighteen forty eight. It went straight to New York, where it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in the autumn of that year before touring the United States and Havana, and it was bought by an American collector, Woodbury Langdon. It later passed through the dealers Goupil and Colnaghi to the English collector John Naylor in eighteen fifty three. The painting was given to the Louvre in nineteen eighty two. A second version, painted for the Earl of Onslow in eighteen fifty, is in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
Did You Know? Delaroche put Bonaparte on a mule because that is what he actually rode over the Great Saint Bernard pass, and the choice was read as a deliberate reply to David's rearing stallion.
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