8 Famous Napoleon Paintings That Built His Legend (2026)

Eight famous Napoleon paintings tell most of his legend. Five of them were made by his own painters while he rose to power and ruled France. The other three came after he died, and they show the mule, the mud and the exile that the early pictures left out. Several of them are among the most famous paintings in the world, and each one either builds the legend or tests it. A chart up top lines them up by the year of each event and shows how many years passed before it was painted.

The paintings below follow the order of the events they show. The list starts in northern Italy in 1796 and ends on a British warship in 1815, so it reads like one life story. First his own painters tell it, and then the painters who came after him tell it again.

How long after each moment the Napoleon paintings came

All years come from the dates given in this article. A range such as 1 to 3 means the brushwork stretched across several years.

The five pictures made while he ruled came within five years of the moment they show. The three made after his death came 50 to 65 years later, when painters were free to show him worn out and on his own.

Painted for the general and first consul, 1796 to 1801

01Bonaparte at the Pont d'Arcole, Antoine-Jean Gros (1796)

On November 17, 1796, during a war in northern Italy, the young general Bonaparte rallied his soldiers at the bridge of Arcole. Gros's portrait at Arcole shows him in that moment. His head is bare and his hair is long, and he twists back toward the men behind him. He holds a flag in one gloved hand and a sword in the other.

Antoine-Jean Gros had been at the battle himself. With Josephine's help, he got the general to sit for him several times in Milan. The general said yes to a first sketch, and then Gros painted the full picture. It was shown in 1801 at the Salon, which was France's big official art show.

This is Napoleon before he ever wore a crown. A history group called the Fondation Napoléon sees it as the first picture that became a symbol of his legend. But it also points out that, in real life, the bridge was never crossed.

02Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Jacques-Louis David (1800 to 1801)

In May 1800 Bonaparte was the leader of France, with the title of First Consul. He took his army over the Great St Bernard Pass in the Alps to fight the Austrians. In June he beat them at Marengo. Soon after, King Charles IV of Spain ordered David's rearing-horse portrait for a hall of great army leaders in his palace in Madrid.

Napoleon wouldn't sit for it, so Jacques-Louis David used an older portrait and the uniform from Marengo. One of David's sons put on that uniform and posed on top of a ladder. All Napoleon asked was to be shown "calm on a fiery horse." In real life he rode a mule, which is surer on its feet than a horse. He also crossed a couple of days behind his men, on a narrow path. David also carved three names into the rocks at the bottom. One is Bonaparte, and the other two are Hannibal and Charlemagne, two leaders who took armies over the Alps long before.

So how many versions of Napoleon Crossing the Alps are there? David painted five, because after Napoleon saw the first one in David's studio, he asked for more. Each copy has a different color of cloak, horse and harness. The first, with a yellow cloak and a spotted horse, went to the United States with Joseph Bonaparte. It only turned up again in 1949 to 1950, when his great-granddaughter left it to Malmaison, just outside Paris. Napoleon's own copy has a red cloak, and it is in Berlin. The other three are in Vienna and at Versailles.

You can follow David's road from the Revolution to the emperor's court in our guide. A very different crossing of the same pass, by another painter, is number 6 below.

The emperor's official image, 1804 to 1806

03Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa, Antoine-Jean Gros (1804)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Gros's plague hospital at Jaffa shows a day in March 1799, during Bonaparte's war in Syria. The scene is the courtyard of a mosque in the town of Jaffa, and it was being used as an army hospital. Many of the men there had the plague, which is a sickness that kills.

In the painting, the general reaches out and touches the swelling on a sick man's chest, while a doctor tries to stop him. Behind him, an officer covers his nose. On the left, two local men hand out bread, and a soldier who has lost his sight feels his way toward the general.

Napoleon wanted this picture for a reason. People were spreading rumors that he had his own sick soldiers poisoned in Syria. Long ago, people believed that kings could heal the sick with a touch. So when he touches the sick without fear, he looks like one of those healing kings. The painting went on show in 1804, the same year the French Empire began. It now hangs in the Louvre, where you can also find many more great paintings worth seeing.

04The Coronation of Napoleon, Jacques-Louis David (1805 to 1807)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Who painted the picture of Napoleon's coronation? It was Jacques-Louis David, with help from another painter named Georges Rouget. The work took them two years. David's Coronation shows Napoleon about to crown Josephine, with the pope seated behind him. It was first shown to the public at the Louvre in February 1808, and it still hangs there today.

But its timing went wrong. In 1810 Napoleon divorced Josephine and married Marie-Louise of Austria. After that, a painting of Josephine being crowned couldn't hang in one of his palaces. So it was on view for barely six months. People also ask if Napoleon was related to Marie Antoinette. He wasn't related to her by blood, but his second wife, Marie-Louise, was Marie Antoinette's great-niece.

There is a second Coronation, too. Between 1808 and 1822, David painted a copy for a group of American businessmen. It then traveled around the United States and Europe for many years. Versailles bought it in 1947. To find out who is in the crowd and what David painted over, see our list of famous French paintings.

05Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1806)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was only 26 when he showed his portrait of Napoleon on the throne. He sits straight and still and faces us, and almost everything around him is a symbol. The laurel wreath on his head was worn by winning generals in ancient Rome, and later by its emperors. The golden bees on his purple robe were copied from metal insects found in the grave of a very old king named Childeric. At his feet, an eagle spreads across the carpet, and the eagle was the sign of the Roman armies.

Ingres took this stiff, front-facing pose from old holy pictures called icons and from books made by hand in the Middle Ages. People didn't like that, and before the show opened, officials warned that critics would call it "Gothic and barbarous," which meant old-fashioned and crude. The public found it strange, and they thought the emperor's face looked like wax. At the end of that year, Ingres left for Italy.

Six years later, David painted the opposite kind of picture. In The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, Napoleon is next to his desk at 4:13 in the morning. The candle has almost burned down and his hair is messy, and a roll of paper on the desk says CODE. So he looks like a ruler who stays up all night writing laws. A Scottish lord paid for it, and today it hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The legend revised, 1814 to 1880

Outside France, people saw Napoleon in a darker way much sooner. In 1814 Goya painted The Third of May 1808. It shows French soldiers, whose faces we can't see, shooting Spanish rebels on the night after an uprising in Madrid. You will find it among our famous paintings of war and in our guide to Goya's best-known work. French painters changed the legend later. By then Napoleon had been dead for many years, so they could show him tired, cold and alone.

06Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Paul Delaroche (1850)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Paul Delaroche learned to paint from Gros, who called him "the glory of my school." But he painted the crossing of the Alps in a way that Napoleon's own painters never had. He followed a history book that Adolphe Thiers wrote in 1845. In Delaroche's mule crossing, a thoughtful Bonaparte rides a mule with blinders on its eyes. A local guide walks beside him and leads the way, and the soldiers follow behind.

Snow covers the rocks, and he wears a plain coat under his hat. The painting was meant to fix the showy pictures by Napoleon's own painters, so here David's rearing horse becomes a mule. A group of British collectors paid for it, and they also paid for a second one that is now in the Louvre. They were "obsessed with the Napoleonic legend." Queen Victoria and Prince Albert even bought a smaller copy of it. With all that snow, it also shows up among the winter scenes in our famous Christmas paintings.

071814, Campaign of France, Ernest Meissonier (1864)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Ernest Meissonier was born in 1815, so he couldn't paint Napoleon from memory, so he did research instead. He gathered old papers and asked people who had been there what they had seen. He even tried to borrow the emperor's gray coat, but he couldn't get it.

The painting shows Napoleon's fight in France in 1814. He had just won several battles, but the picture already hints at the losses to come. Nothing much happens in it. He rides alone in front on a white horse, and his officers ride close together behind him, full of doubt. The snow under them has turned dirty from the marching army. It is painted on a wooden board, and it is small for a war scene.

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has an even smaller painting from the same war. Meissonier's 1862 picture of Napoleon alone on horseback was made for the emperor's nephew. It is set just after a hard-won victory at a town called Arcis-sur-Aube.

08Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon, William Quiller Orchardson (1880)

The last picture is the quietest one. William Quiller Orchardson painted Napoleon after he had lost his throne, on the deck of a British warship called the Bellerophon. The ship is taking him to the island of St Helena, where he was kept in exile until he died in 1821.

He stands apart from everyone and looks out to sea. On the left, his officers watch him and wonder about him. An empty stretch of deck lies between him and them, along with the masts and ropes. Orchardson trained in Edinburgh, and he moved to London in 1862. Tate in London bought the painting in 1880, the same year it was first shown, but it is not on display right now.

David's horse or Delaroche's mule

The two paintings of the crossing of the Great St Bernard Pass were made about fifty years apart. One was painted for a king's palace, and the other was painted to fix it, so together they sum up these famous Napoleon paintings. To see more by the painter who shaped Napoleon's public face, look through our Jacques-Louis David collection.

Sources

• Palace of Versailles, Bonaparte au pont d'Arcole, 17 novembre 1796 (collection record, in French)
• Fondation Napoléon, General Bonaparte on the bridge at Arcole, 17 November 1796
• Palace of Versailles, Napoleon. Images of the legend (exhibition)
• Smarthistory, Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps
• Château de Malmaison, Le Premier consul franchissant les Alpes au col du Grand-Saint-Bernard (collection record, in French)
• Fondation Napoléon, Le Premier Consul franchissant les Alpes (in French)
• Belvedere, Vienna, Napoleon at the Great St. Bernard Pass (collection record)
• Palace of Versailles, Bonaparte franchissant le mont Saint-Bernard (collection record, in French)
• Louvre, Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa (collection record)
• Fondation Napoléon, Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa (in French)
• Louvre, Le Couronnement de l'empereur Napoléon Ier (collection record)
• Fondation Napoléon, Le Sacre or the Coronation of Napoleon
• Palace of Versailles, The Coronation Room
• Palace of Versailles, Marie-Louise
• Musée de l'Armée, Napoléon Ier sur le trône impérial, par Ingres (object sheet, PDF, in French)
• National Gallery of Art, The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries
• Fundación Goya en Aragón, The Third of May 1808 (catalogue entry)
• Walker Art Gallery on Google Arts & Culture, Paul Delaroche, Napoleon Crossing the Alps
• Royal Collection Trust, Paul Delaroche, Napoleon Bonaparte crossing the Alps
• Musée d'Orsay, Ernest Meissonier, Campagne de France, 1814
• Walters Art Museum, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, 1814
• Tate, William Quiller Orchardson, Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon