Napoleon Crossing the Alps is a portrait by Jacques-Louis David, painted between the autumn of 1800 and January 1801. It shows Napoleon on a rearing horse above a storm, and it is not a record of what happened. He crossed the Great Saint Bernard Pass on a mule.
David painted five versions of it, and the first was made for the king of Spain, not for Napoleon.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
By tradition, the calm was Napoleon's idea. According to Jean Étienne Delécluze, a pupil of David who published a memoir of the studio in 1855, the First Consul asked to be shown calm on a fiery horse. He did not sit for the portrait. David worked in his studio from mannequins and from the coat Napoleon had worn at Marengo.
The real day looked different. On 20 May 1800 Napoleon reached the top of the pass in the late afternoon, riding a mule, in what the Fondation Napoléon calls dangerous conditions, made worse by snow and cold. A local guide led the animal. On one stretch of the path the mule lost its footing and would have fallen down the mountainside, and the guide held on tight until it was steady.
I don't read the painting as a lie. A portrait of a general in 1800 was meant to show what he stood for, and a mule slipping at the edge of a drop stood for nothing. That is the scene the picture leaves out.
Who really ordered the painting?
Not Napoleon. The commission came from Charles IV, king of Spain, who wanted a portrait of the new hero of Europe for the Salon of the Great Captains in the royal palace in Madrid, and it reached David through the Spanish ambassador in Paris. The Fondation Napoléon says the order may even predate the crossing itself, and dates it to late 1799 or early 1800.
David painted that first canvas between the autumn of 1800 and January 1801. Napoleon liked the result well enough to order three more, and a fifth stayed in David's studio. The copies were made for the consular residence at Saint Cloud, for the Invalides and for the palace of the Italian Republic in Milan.
Spain would have its general on the wall. Whether the general had ever sat for it was a separate question.
What You'll Discover
Who posed in Napoleon's coat.
What is carved under the hooves.
Who held the mule.
Where the horse went next.