ANTOINE-JEAN GROS WAS BORN in 1771 and would go on to become one of the most significant artists of the Napoleonic era. It was Gros above all others who captured Le petit caporal both as he climbed to power and in his pomp.
After Napoleon’s final defeat, Gros rose to even greater eminence under the restored Bourbon monarchy. Nevertheless, he remains an undervalued figure and while his huge paintings of the Napoleonic adventure hang in the Louvre and in Versailles they are routinely dismissed as works of bombast and propaganda.
The painter and
