Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau
Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835) · 1808
It is the morning after the battle of Eylau, the ninth of February eighteen hundred and seven, in the snow of East Prussia. Napoleon rides across the field on a pale horse, his arm extended in a gesture of pity, surrounded by his marshals and his doctors. A wounded Lithuanian soldier, held up by the surgeon Percy, speaks to him; another wounded man kisses the emperor's leg. To the right, Marshal Murat wheels his black horse. In the foreground, laid out across the snow, are the dead and the dying, one of them still struggling, and behind them the plain stretches away under a grey sky, smoke rising from the burning village.
Gros won the commission in a competition organised in March eighteen hundred and seven by Vivant Denon, the director of the imperial museums, and the picture was shown at the Salon of eighteen hundred and eight. It was paid sixteen thousand francs, in four instalments. The painting is enormous, over five metres high and nearly eight wide, and it works on two scales at once. From a distance the composition is a frieze of horsemen against the snow. Close up, the foreground becomes a study of the cost of war: frozen faces, bandaged heads, a hand reaching from under a body. Gros painted the corpses with a truthfulness that no official picture had attempted before.
Eylau was a bloodbath that settled nothing, and the emperor's propaganda needed to turn it into an image of clemency. Gros gave Napoleon the face of a saviour, greenish and tired, and the Lithuanian soldier the words of a convert, but what stays with visitors is the snow and the dead. The picture is signed and dated at the lower left. It came to the Louvre from the imperial collections and remains the largest and most ambitious of the Napoleonic battle paintings hanging in the museum.
Did You Know? Gros won the right to paint this picture in a competition of eighteen hundred and seven organised by Vivant Denon, and the finished work earned him sixteen thousand francs.
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