Pictures of Napoleon 3
Mar. 24th, 2025 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo If you hate a modern poltician you liken them to Hitler and if you admire them you liken them to Churchill or Lincoln but no-one in their right mind likens any modern leader to Napoleon.
Napoleon is just too extraordinary, his legacy too ambiguous. He did wonderful things, he did atrocious things, he was- to use a cliche that is really true in his case- a legend in his own lifetime. I've racked my brains and I can't think of anyone in the history books, ancient or modern, who compares to him- unless it's Alexander the Great.
The artists who were contemporary with him helped create the legend, those that came after him questioned it, but always from a respectful distance. They want to understand and explain the man behind the mask; they never succeed.
Paul Delaroche painted his Napoleon Crossing the Alps as a direct riposte to David. Instead of the rearing charger there's a mule and the mule is being guided by peasant. This is almost certainly how it really happened, but the the young general is still intense and farseeing and no less heroic for being cold.
J-L Gerome paints the riddle confronting the Riddle in a work called either "Napoleon and the Sphinx" or "Oedipus". I love this painting
I used to think this next painting showed the Retreat from Moscow. It doesn't. It shows the French coming away from the Battle of Laon- an inconclusive engagement fought against the Prussians in the months before Waterloo. Napoleon, the man apart, grim but determined, rides ahead of his marshals and generals, at least one of whom seems to be falling asleep in the saddle. The artist is E. Meissonier.
Finally, in a change from all these French artists we have a Scot-William Quiller Orchardson- who- painting at the end of the 19th century- shows us Napoleon on board the Bellerephon (or Billy Ruffian in sailor-speak) on his way to exile in St Helena. The man of destiny stands alone and broods, the British officers huddle behind him and marvel.
By the way, I think we greatly undervalue this kind of narrative art. We lionise the Impressionists at the expense of all their contemporaries but painters like Gerome and Orchardson were doing something the Impressionists didn't even attempt and their work has its own validity and is capable of moving us deeply.
Napoleon is just too extraordinary, his legacy too ambiguous. He did wonderful things, he did atrocious things, he was- to use a cliche that is really true in his case- a legend in his own lifetime. I've racked my brains and I can't think of anyone in the history books, ancient or modern, who compares to him- unless it's Alexander the Great.
The artists who were contemporary with him helped create the legend, those that came after him questioned it, but always from a respectful distance. They want to understand and explain the man behind the mask; they never succeed.
Paul Delaroche painted his Napoleon Crossing the Alps as a direct riposte to David. Instead of the rearing charger there's a mule and the mule is being guided by peasant. This is almost certainly how it really happened, but the the young general is still intense and farseeing and no less heroic for being cold.
J-L Gerome paints the riddle confronting the Riddle in a work called either "Napoleon and the Sphinx" or "Oedipus". I love this painting
I used to think this next painting showed the Retreat from Moscow. It doesn't. It shows the French coming away from the Battle of Laon- an inconclusive engagement fought against the Prussians in the months before Waterloo. Napoleon, the man apart, grim but determined, rides ahead of his marshals and generals, at least one of whom seems to be falling asleep in the saddle. The artist is E. Meissonier.
Finally, in a change from all these French artists we have a Scot-William Quiller Orchardson- who- painting at the end of the 19th century- shows us Napoleon on board the Bellerephon (or Billy Ruffian in sailor-speak) on his way to exile in St Helena. The man of destiny stands alone and broods, the British officers huddle behind him and marvel.
By the way, I think we greatly undervalue this kind of narrative art. We lionise the Impressionists at the expense of all their contemporaries but painters like Gerome and Orchardson were doing something the Impressionists didn't even attempt and their work has its own validity and is capable of moving us deeply.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-24 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-24 09:26 pm (UTC)Agreed. Unfortunately, he made grave mistake with Russia and Alexander I...