Napoleon Crossing the Alps shows Napoleon Bonaparte calm on a rearing horse in May 1800, as his army crossed the Great St Bernard Pass into Italy. Jacques-Louis David painted it in the months that followed, and the scene is fiction. Napoleon made the crossing on a mule.
The picture did what it was made to do. A general who had spent days hauling cannon over a mountain pass became a hero in the line of Hannibal and Charlemagne, and that horse is still the image of him most people carry.
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Propaganda is the word people use, and it suggests a ruler dictating every brushstroke. It was messier than that. David asked Napoleon to sit for him, and Napoleon refused. He said that nobody knows whether portraits of great men resemble them, and that it is enough for their genius to live in them. His one request, as the story goes, was to be shown calm on a fiery horse.
So David painted without him. The face came from a bust. For the body, one of David's own sons put on the uniform and balanced on top of a ladder, playing the First Consul on a rearing horse. I take Napoleon's remark about portraits as the plainest description of this picture anyone ever gave: it was never meant to be a likeness.
Who really ordered the painting?
Not Napoleon. The order came from the king of Spain, Charles IV, through his ambassador in Paris. Spain was France's ally, and Napoleon had just become First Consul and won in Italy, so a gift to him was a gift to the new master of France. The canvas was meant for the room of the great captains in the Royal Palace in Madrid.
The paper trail is thin. The Fondation Napoléon says the commission is poorly documented and may go back to late 1799 or early 1800, which means the painting may have been ordered before the crossing itself took place. The goodwill ran both ways: horses and portraits by Goya traveled from Spain to Paris in return.
The canvas did not stay in Madrid. Napoleon's brother Joseph carried it off, and it passed down through his descendants until 1949, when it was left to the Château de Malmaison. By then the real crossing had been forgotten behind the picture.
What You'll Discover
What the crossing was really like.
What is carved in the rocks.
Why David painted it five times.
Who painted Napoleon on a mule.