Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa
Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835) · 1804
The courtyard of a mosque at Jaffa has been turned into a plague hospital during the Egyptian and Syrian campaign. General Bonaparte, bare-handed, reaches out to touch the bubo on the chest of a sick soldier while an army doctor tries to pull him back and an aide presses a cloth to his nose. The gesture is a deliberate echo of medieval kings touching for scrofula, and it was meant to answer a very specific rumour: that Bonaparte had ordered plague-stricken men to be poisoned with opium so the army could retreat unencumbered.
Gros builds the scene like a theatre. Moorish arcades frame the group, a blinded man gropes forward at the left, naked bodies sprawl in the shadowed foreground in poses borrowed from Poussin's Plague at Ashdod, and beyond the arches the tricolour flies over the captured town under a hot pale sky. The colour is the real event: acid yellows and greenish flesh in the shade, then a sudden clean blue and white on the general. Gros was trained by David, but the loose, atmospheric handling and the taste for horror point straight to Géricault and Delacroix across the room.
The commission came from Vivant Denon in 1804, the year Napoleon became emperor, and the picture was the hit of that year's Salon, hung with a palm branch awarded by public acclaim. Gros never went to Jaffa; he worked from sketches and from officers' testimony. He later returned to a chilly Neoclassicism at David's urging, was mocked for it, and drowned himself in the Seine in 1835. Look for the Ottoman physicians at the right, lancing buboes with no more protection than the general.
Did You Know? The painting was commissioned as propaganda to kill a persistent story that Bonaparte had poisoned his own plague-stricken soldiers at Jaffa.
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