Napoleonic painting from Gros to Delaroche: A study in history minor

This dissertation argues that in First Empire France, history painting split into distinct visual languages that claimed historical legibility for viewers of different social backgrounds. Artists such as Jacques-Louis David defined Napoleonic authority through an esoteric, monumental idiom that solicited the approval of an academic elite; meanwhile, painters like Nicolas-Antoine Taunay and Adolphe Roehn eased the less historically aware into support of the regime with anecdotal scenes of Napoleonic genre, equated here with oral history in pictorial form. The Salon walls thus simulated Napoleon's paradoxical fusion of imperial ambitions with democratic pretensions; grand-scale works depicting Napoleon robed in regal finery and small-scale history paintings of Napoleon the homme du peuple performed symbiotically in a historical mirage of balance between monarchic and republican extremes.;Such alternate historical strategies were not necessarily determined by questions of individual style. Antoine-Jean Gros engaged "monumental" and "anecdotal" historical tactics within single works, simultaneously exploiting classical iconography and the more contemporary languages of journalism and genre painting to carry out Napoleon's political tasks. The government programs behind Gros's paintings required the inclusion of genre-like anecdotes, propagandist devices that blurred the line between fact and fiction while courting the public's desire for romantic narratives. However, Gros's works often went beyond administrative expectations, complicating to an extreme any claims to Napoleonic supremacy that official painting might be expected to proffer.;The last two chapters of the dissertation investigate how the system of anecdotal narrative that served official and popular interests under Napoleon persisted in historical representations after the collapse of his regime. Horace Vernet's nostalgic historical ethos is discussed as an extension of one of the Empire's official styles, representing the transfiguration of history painting into an expression of public and personal consciousness. The dissertation closes with the Napoleonic paintings of Paul Delaroche, whose retrospective remove allowed him to express what Gros, his teacher, could not: the inevitable failure of one of history's most powerful figures, and the eternal power of history itself.