Gros

Antoine-Jean, baron
(Paris, 1771 - Meudon, 1835)

One of the painters who had the most influence on nineteenth century artists, Gros specialized in the great epic scenes dear to Napoleon.

Son of a painter of miniatures, young Antoine Jean Gros was in the company of artists very young and was free to develop his precocious gifts. In 1785 he entered the studio of David, and in 17887 he was admitted to the school of the Academy of Painting. In 1792 he tried without success to win the Prize of Rome with his "Antiochus trying to force Eleazar to eat unclean meat (Saint Lo).

The following year, thanks to David, he obtained a passport for Italy, visited the south of France, Florence, then settled in Genoa. It was there that, in 1796, he met Josephine, who had finally come to join Bonaparte, commander in chief of the army in Italy. The empress-to-be presented him to Napoleon, who appointed him to the commission charged with finding the art objects which the conquered Italian states owed to France as war contributions.

The artist covered Italy in his search for works to enrich the collections of the Louvre. He drew antiques, copied the Italian masters, studied Rubens. In his work already appeared a hesitation between the Davidian teaching and a pre-romantic dynamism, a dualism which would be found throughout his career. He painted portraits, notably the one of Bonaparte at Arcole (Versailles); he tried his hand at antique subjects and (even this early) romantic ones. He illustrated Young and Ossian, or conjured up Sappho at Leucate (Salon of 1801, Bayeux).

Because of his duties Gros found himself initiated into the military life. This experience predisposed him to become the ideal interpreter of the glorious feats of the consulate and the empire. When he returned to Paris in October of 1800 Bonaparte ordered from him The Victims of the Plague in Jaffa (Louvre), a great canvas which was triumphantly accepted by the Salon of 1804.

During the following years he dedicated himself particularly to enormous compositions dreamed up by Napoleon to do honor to the national character: The Battle of Aboukir, displayed at the Salon of 1806 (Versailles), The Battlefield of Eylau, Salon of 1808 (Louvre), The Taking of Madrid and The Battle of the Pyramids, Salon of 1810 (Versailles). In 1811 he received the order to decorate the cupola of the Pantheon, a work which he did not complete until 1824, after modifying the project to please Louis XVIII.

After the return of the Bourbons in 1814 he became the official portrait painter of the king and entered the Academy of Fine Arts, but he collided with the influence of Ingres. The Restoration marked the high point of his career but also a certain weakening of his epic inspiration. Charles X made him a baron, but the decline of the artist was inescapable. At the Salon of 1822 the press was unbridled in criticizing his allegorical works or those inspired by antiquity. Gros soon saw himself condemned by the romantics and by the classicists. The failure of his Hercules and Diomedes in 1835 (Toulouse) is perhaps what drove him to suicide. On July 26, 1835, he drowned himself in the Seine at Bas Meudon.

Delacroix, one of his pupils, detailed in an 1848 article for the Revue des deux Mondes everything which he owed to a master whom he admired for having introduced color and movement into his work: "Gros raised modern subjects into the ideal; he knew how to paint the dress, the customs, the passions of his time without lapsing into pettiness or triviality, the danger of those sorts of subject." It is beyond doubt that Gros is the painter who, along with David, most influenced the doctrines and practices of the artists of the nineteenth century.