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French Historical Studies 26.2 (2003) 281-314



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Propaganda and the Republic of the Arts in Antoine-Jean Gros's Napoléon Visiting the Battlefield of Eylau the Morning after the Battle

David O'Brien

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Antoine-Jean Gros occupies a special position in the history of art: among the French painters whom we still regularly admire, he is the last to make his reputation working primarily for the government. Most large-scale French painting from after the Napoleonic period that is championed in aesthetic terms today was independently conceived or, at best, only loosely related to the dictates of the state. By the middle of the nineteenth century, large-scale painting in general was commonly pronounced dead, even as the government continued to assign important commissions for major mural paintings throughout the century. For Théophile Gautier, writing in 1848, monumental painting was "an anachronism and a nonsense for our age." It could still "serve to decorate national and public buildings, temples of prayer and temples of pleasure," but its potential for satisfying "individual taste" had vanished. 1

Even within the Napoleonic period, Gros is an exception. Official painting of the Consulate and Empire has attracted relatively little attention from art historians, particularly in comparison to that of the previous decades. One reason for this is the prejudice within the discipline, seldom expressed overtly, that important artists in the post-Revolutionary period worked increasingly at a certain remove from [End Page 281] state power. Stated baldly, the belief is that: "Without freedom from the control of the socially and politically powerful it is not possible to create art. Art is therefore always potentially subversive, so that it is understandable and in a sense ‘rational' for governments to become suspicious of art and artists, as they always are." 2 The modernist conviction that art must derive from the autonomous desire of the artist and not from the imperatives of the state has led to a separation of art from official propaganda, with little attention paid to the historical circumstances from which this attitude arose. Those few instances where official propaganda has been celebrated in the history of modern art—Diego Rivera's murals for the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City, or Picasso's Guernica, painted for the Spanish Republican government in exile—are exceptions that prove the rule. Yet, prior to the French Revolution, most large-scale painting promoted the interests of the church and the state. Art and propaganda were only beginning to crystallize into opposing cultural categories under Napoléon, and therefore we should look to this period to understand the circumstances that led to their separation.

Under Napoléon, artists struggled to reconcile their function as propagandists with the expectation that they would work autonomously or respond freely to the public's demands. In general, the more history painting assumed the dutiful role Napoléon assigned it, the less it generated critical interest. Early Napoleonic painting benefited from its residual involvement with Revolutionary debates and from experimentation with new types of battle painting, but these forms quickly gave way to a monotonous line of sycophantic canvases portraying Napoléon as a moral leader, motivator, peacemaker, and clement conqueror. Only Gros managed repeatedly to inject drama into such painting.

This essay interprets one of Gros's most enduring paintings, his Napoléon Visiting the Battlefield of Eylau the Morning after the Battle of 1808 (fig. 1). The Eylau originated in an artistic competition held in 1807 to commemorate the battle. The guidelines issued to the competitors dictated much of the gruesome content in Gros's painting, but his exceptionally brutal sketch was chosen over more anodyne entries for execution on the grand scale. 3 This raises intriguing questions about the government's motivations for commissioning a painting of the battle. What benefit for the government lay in Gros's terrible exploration of [End Page 282] suffering and death? Why, for example, depict so explicitly the blood frozen onto the blade of...

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