Antoine-Jean Gros, Pesthouse at Jaffa

Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835) began working in Jacques Louis David’s studio as a teenager and eventually vied with his master for commissions from Napoleon. Gros traveled with Napoleon in Italy in 1797 and later became an official chronicler of his military campaigns. His painting Napoleon In the Plague House at Jaffa is also a representation of an actual event. During Napoleon’s campaign against the Ottoman Turks in 1799, bubonic plague broke out among his troops. Napoleon decided to try and quiet the fears of the still-healthy soldiers by visiting the sick and dying, who were housed in a converted mosque in the town of Jaffa (then part of the Ottoman Empire, and now in Israel). The format of Gros’ painting – a shallow stage and a series of arcades behind the main protagonists – seems to have been inspired by David’s Oath of the Horatii. But Gros’ painting is quite different from David’s: His color is more vibrant and his brushwork more spontaneous. The overall effect is Romantic, not simply because of the dramatic lighting and the wealth of details, both exotic and horrific, but also because the main action is meant to incite veneration of Napoleon the man more than the republican virtue.

At the center of the painting, surrounded by a small group of soldiers and a doctor, Napoleon reaches toward the sores of one of the victims in a pose that was meant to evoke Christ healing the sick with his touch. The huddled figures to the left remind us of the mouth of hell in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. At that time there was a rumor that shortly after Napoleon’s visit to Jaffa, he ordered the remaining sick to be poisoned. Gros may have been aware of this rumor when he painted Napoleon as small and tentative compared to the Arab doctors and even the sick.^[1]