Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse

Collection Baron Gros;

His sale after death, Paris, 23 March 1835, lot 153;

Collection Mr. Saint;

His sale, M^e Bonnefons de Lavialle, Paris, 5 May 1846, lot 164; 

Anonymous sale, Osenat, Fontainebleau, 7 November 2004, lot 426;

Where acquired by the present owner.

A. Esnault, Projet de catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre de Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, 2001 (unpublished), no. 130;

Napoléon, l'Empereur sous la verrière du Grand Palais : La collection Pierre-Jean Chalençon, cat. exh. Grand Palais, Paris 2018, pp. 74-75.

Napoleon: An Intimate Portrait. A travelling exhibition from the Russell Etling Company featuring the Collection of Pierre-Jean Chalençon, Catalogue by Pierre-Jean Chalençon, Brett Topping and Russell Hull Etling, Russell Etling Company, 2005-2011, pp. 72-73.

Looking straight at the viewer, the First Consul here has youthful, idealized features and a determined expression. Mounted on a piebald horse, he wears the uniform of a general of the Republic, with a hat trimmed in gold and a voluminous red cloak billowing in the wind. Ignoring his horse rearing up at the sight of the steep rock face, he points resolutely upwards with his right arm, in a victorious gesture. The rich and supple quality of the paint has none of the dry feel of a copy. Yet Mauzaisse’s painting is a rendering, in a reduced format, of the famous Napoleon Crossing the Alps at the Great St Bernard Pass, commissioned from Jacques-Louis David in 1800, in five versions. One, probably the original, measuring 260 x 221 cm, is in the Musée National du Château de Malmaison. The others are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Musée National du Château de Versailles and Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin.

Napoleon himself apparently asked to be ‘painted calm on a spirited horse’, the noble mount replacing the modest mule he actually rode and which appears in the painting of the same subject by Hippolyte Delaroche (1848; Musée du Louvre). The large versions are differentiated by a few variations, for example the colouring of the horse’s coat and of the cloak, which is yellow ochre in the Malmaison painting and red in the Versailles version. It was the colour of the latter that inspired Mauzaisse’s copy.

This almost allegorical representation, which bears no relation to reality, transforms the young general, hero of modern times, into the incarnation of a timeless hero. It has an exceptional visual power and can be numbered among the iconic portraits of the future Emperor. It was inevitable that it would inspire David’s pupils and followers, including his assistant Georges Rouget and of course Mauzaisse, who was famous in his time for subjects relating to Napoleon’s epic career, for grand decorative schemes (especially those in the Musée Charles X in the Louvre) and for his portraits.