"The Clemency of General Bonaparte to an Arab family at the French entry into Alexandria; 3 July 1798"

Oil on Canvas

37 ½ x 47 ½ inches (95 x 121 cm)

Size including frame: 48 x 60 inches (122 x 152.5 cm)

Indistinctly signed Gerrard(?) and indistinctly dated 1880(?), lower right

Price on Application

cm@marineartists.co.uk

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Email or telephone to reserve or buy this painting cm@marineartists.co.uk +44(0)20 7352 7759

The painting may be viewed in London by appointment

Full description and larger photographs and detail photographs are available on request

This is an exceptional, large 19^th century Napoleon painting. Based on the enormous canvas by Guillaume-François Colson (a pupil of the great Jacques-Louis David) which was exhibited at the Salon in 1812 and is now at Versailles, it nonetheless differs from Colson’s painting in a number of details, in particular the omission of a soldier at the extreme left.

Presented in a truly magnificent carved and gilt frame 6 ¼ inches (16 cm) in width, this is a stunning statement painting befitting a large drawing-room, library or study.

The story depicted took place during the French entry into the conquered Egyptian city of Alexandria on the 3^rd of July 1798. Some defenders continued to resist, firing on the French from buildings, and in the painting we see an Arab man about to be executed by furious French soldiers. The distraught women of his family have thrown themselves down before Napoleon pleading for his life, proffering a tiny baby and begging for mercy.

Napoleon – then General Bonaparte – stretches out his right hand in the gesture of a king or a god to stop the soldier with a sword from killing the Arab. This painting, as conceived in 1812, was designed to reinforce the myth of the Emperor (as Napoleon was by then) as a merciful ruler above the ranks of ordinary men and as a man of chivalry who will listen to the appeals of helpless women. It stands alongside similar depictions of Napoleon’s clemency to the daughter of Saint-Simon at Madrid or to the eight-months-pregnant princesse de Hatzfeld, whose husband had been condemned to death for treason. There are also parallels with Gros’s great painting “Bonaparte visiting the Plaque Victims at Jaffa”, another scene from the Egyptian campaign, in which Napoleon appears once again as a god or a king laying his hands upon the victims of bubonic plague.

Grouped together with Napoleon are two other generals, both later to become Marshals and central to the Napoleonic story, Murat and Berthier. Excellent portraits of both men appear above the head of Bonaparte’s grey horse.

This painting is more concerned with the glorification of the Emperor than with the simple depiction of history. It contains elements that would have been instantly recognisable to those viewing Colson's huge painting in 1812 – several soldiers near Napoleon are in the uniform of the Chasseurs à Cheval de la Garde Impériale, Napoleon’s favoured bodyguard, who were the Guides à Cheval in 1798; and the grey horse is clearly meant to be reminiscent of the famous Marengo, who did indeed come from Egypt but may not have been in the General’s possession at the taking of Alexandria.