Antoine-Jean Gros

Antoine-Jean Gros invented Napoleonic propaganda painting and killed himself when the taste he had created moved on without him. He trained under David, the great neoclassicist, and then met Bonaparte in Italy in 1796 through Josephine's introduction. The painting that came out of it, Bonaparte at the Bridge of Arcole, shows a young general with a standard and a sabre turning to look back at troops the viewer cannot see, and it did more to construct the Napoleonic image than any despatch. He followed the armies. Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa, painted in 1804, shows the general touching the sore of a plague patient, which is a deliberate echo of the royal touch and an answer to the accusation that he had poisoned his own sick at Jaffa. The Battlefield of Eylau shows the snow full of dead in a way official art was not supposed to. His colour and movement came from Rubens rather than from David, and Gericault and Delacroix took the Romantic movement out of him. After 1815 he inherited David's studio and David's instructions to return to strict classicism, produced increasingly cold mythological work, and was savaged for it by critics who had grown up on his own early paintings. He drowned himself in three feet of water in the Seine at Meudon in 1835, leaving a note about the failure of his last work. Arcole is a painting of something that did not happen the way it shows. Gros sketched Bonaparte holding the pose in a room; the actual attempt on the bridge failed and the general ended up in a ditch. The picture is the version that survived, which is roughly the whole argument about images and events. Gros was made a baron by Napoleon and kept the title through the Restoration.

• Lived: 1771 CE – 1835 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: artist