Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole

Among the major names in French painting in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Gros was probably the only one who remained loyal to the national school’s traditional values, seen in the work’s dense structures and elaborate colour scheme. Thanks to these qualities, the conventional heroic portrait acquires an emotional charge that foreshadows Romanticism. The work’s persuasiveness is heightened because Gros witnessed the event when while accompanying Napoleon during his Italian campaign in 1796.