Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Antoine-Jean Gros · 1804

The story

Bonaparte Visits the Plague Victims of Jaffa (French: Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa) is a propagandistic, oil-on-canvas painting commissioned by Napoleon and painted in 1804 by Antoine-Jean Gros, portraying an event during the French invasion of Egypt and Syria. The scene shows Napoleon during an event which is supposed to have occurred in Jaffa on 11 March 1799, depicting him making a visit to ill French soldiers at the Saint Nicholas Monastery.

Napoleon commissioned the painting in an attempt to embroider his mythology and quell reports that he had ordered fifty plague victims in Jaffa be given fatal doses of opium during his retreat from Syria. It also served a propaganda purpose in countering reports of French atrocities during their siege of Jaffa. On 18 September 1804, the painting was exhibited at the Académie des Beaux-Arts' Salon, between Napoleon's proclamation as emperor on 18 May and his coronation at the Notre-Dame de Paris on 2 December. Dominique Vivant Denon, who participated in the invasion of Egypt and Syria before serving as director of the Louvre, advised Gros when he executed the painting, which now forms part of the Louvre's collection of French art.

Artist: Antoine-Jean Gros
Date: 1804
Collection: Louvre, Paris, France
Movement: Neoclassical painting, Orientalist painting
Medium: oil paint, canvas
Size: 523 × 715 cm

Story adapted from the Wikipedia article and its contributors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Facts from Wikidata (CC0). Image: Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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