He went to Italy on his own account, and was an eye-witness of the war which Napoleon was there waging. There he beheld scenes in which archæology had no part. For when Augereau’s foot-soldiers carried the bridge of Arcola by assault, they had little thought of imitating an antique bas-relief. Gros observed armies on the march, and saw their triumphant entry into festally decorated cities. He learnt his lesson on the field of battle, and on his return placed on record what he had himself gone through. In Italy he caught the poetry of modern life, and at the same time was enabled as a painter to supplement David’s lectures with the teaching of another surpassing master. It was in Genoa that he became acquainted with Rubens. As Prudhon’s originality consisted in the fact that he was the first of that period again to stand dreaming before Leonardo and Correggio, so did Gros’ lie in this, that he studied Rubens at a time when the Antwerp master was also completely out of fashion. His instinct as a painter had at the very commencement guided him to Rubens’ “St. Ignatius,” which in his letters he described as a “sublime and magnificent work.” When he was subsequently appointed a member of the Commission charged with the transference of works of art to Paris, he had abundant opportunities of admiring critically the works of the sixteenth and seventeenth century masters. The two impressions thus received had a decisive effect upon his life. Gros became the great colourist of the Classical school, the singer of the Napoleonic epos. Compared with David’s marmoreal Græco-Romans, Gros’ figures seem to belong to another world; his pictures speak, both in purport and in technique, a language which must more than once have astonished his master.

PRUDHON.   L’ENJOUIR.

He was fortunate enough to be presented to Josephine Beauharnais, and through her to Bonaparte, in the Casa Serbelloni at Milan; and Gros, whose earnest desire it was to paint the great commander, was appointed a lieutenant on his staff. He had occasion, in the three days’ battle of Arcola, to admire the Dictator’s impetuous heroism; and he made a sketch of the General storming the bridge of Arcola at the head of his troops, ensign in hand. It pleased Napoleon, who saw in it something of the dæmonic power of the future conqueror of the world; and when the picture was exhibited in Paris in 1801 it met there also with the most striking success. The greater warmth of colour, the broader sweep of the brush, and the life-like movement of the figures seemed, in comparison with David’s monotonous manner, to be far-reaching innovations.

With his “Napoleon on the Bridge of Arcola” Gros had found his peculiar talent. What his teacher had accomplished as painter to the Convention, Gros carried to a conclusion in that span of time during which Napoleon lived in the minds of his people as a hero. He too made an occasional excursion into the domain of Greek mythology, but he did not feel at home there. His field was that living history which the generals and soldiers of France were making. He won for contemporary military life its citizenship in art. David, wishing to remain true to “history” and to “style,” had depicted contemporary events with reluctance. What Gérard and Girodet had produced was interesting as a protest on the part of reality against classical convention, but on the whole it was unsatisfying and wearisome. Gros, the famous painter of the “Plague of Jaffa” and of the “Battle of Eylau,” was the first to attain to high renown in this field.

PRUDHON.MARGUERITE.

These are two powerful and genuine pictures, two pre-eminent works which will endure. Gros stands far above David and all his rivals in his power of perception. The elder painter is now out of date, while Gros remains ever fresh, because he painted under the impulse given by real events, and not under the ban of empty theories. A realist through and through, he did not shrink from representing the horrible, which antique art preferred to avoid. In an epoch when Rome and Greece were the only sources of inspiration he had the courage to paint a hospital, with its sick, its dying, and its dead. When in the Egypto-Syrian campaign the plague broke out after the storming of Jaffa, Napoleon, accompanied by a few of his officers, undertook, on 7th March 1799, to visit the victims of the pestilence. This act deserved to be celebrated in a commemorative picture. Gros took it in hand, and represented Napoleon, in the character of consoler, amid the agonising torments of the dying; deviating from historical accuracy only so far as to transfer the scene from the wretched wards of the lazaretto to the courtyard of a pillared mosque. In the shadows of the airy halls sick and wounded men twist and writhe, stare before them in despair, rear themselves up half-naked in mortal pain, or turn to gaze upon the Commander-in-Chief, a splendid apparition full of youthful power, who is tranquilly feeling the plague boils of one of their comrades. Here and there Orientals move in picturesque costumes, distributing the food which negro lads are bringing in. And beyond, over the battlements of the Moorish arcades, one sees the town with its fortifications, its flat roofs and slender minarets, over which flutter the victorious banners of the French. On one side lies the distant, glittering blue sea, and over all stretches the clear, glowing southern sky.

Like a new gospel, like the first gust of wind preceding the storm of Romanticism, this picture standing in the Louvre, surrounded by its stiff Classical contemporaries, excites a sensation of pleasure.

PRUDHON.   LES PETITS DÉVIDEURS.

Gros’ heroes know, as David’s do, that they are important, and show it perhaps too much, but at least they act. The painter felt what he was painting, and an impulse of human love, an heroic and yet human life, permeates the picture. Moreover, Gros did not content himself with the scanty palette and the miserable cartoon-draughtsmanship of his contemporaries. This treatment of the nude, these despairing heads of dying men, show none of the stony lifelessness of the Classical school; this Moorish courtyard has no resemblance to the tragedy peristyle so habitually employed up to that time; this Bonaparte laying his hand upon the dying man’s sores is no Greek or Roman hero. The sick men whose feverish eyes gaze upon him as on the star of hope, the negroes going up and down with viands, are no mere supernumeraries; the sea lying in sunshine beyond, full of bustling sails, and the harbour gaily decked with many-coloured flags, point in their joyous splendour of colouring to the dawn of a new era. The young artists were not mistaken when, in the Salon of 1804, they fastened a sprig of laurel to the frame of the picture. The State bought it for sixteen thousand francs. A banquet at which Vien and David presided was given in honour of the painter. Girodet read a poem, of which the conclusion ran as follows—

“Et toi, sage Vien, toi, David, maître illustre, Jouissez de vos succès; dans son sixième lustre, Votre élève, déjà de toutes parts cité, Auprès de vous vivra dans la postérité.”