Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

By the time this went up at the 1804 Salon, the man at its centre had just been proclaimed emperor and was three months from crowning himself at Notre-Dame. That timing matters. Napoleon commissioned Gros to paint a moment from the Egyptian campaign five years earlier, when he walked into a plague ward at Jaffa and reached out to touch a sick soldier. Reaching for the man's sore is the whole point of the picture. Kings of France were believed to heal by touch, and here Napoleon borrows that old royal gesture as he steps, unafraid, among the dying. The painting also quietly answered an uglier rumour, that during the retreat he had ordered plague victims dosed with fatal opium so they would not slow the army. Gros had never seen Jaffa, so he built the scene from imagination, giving it the arches and light of the East he could picture. In the shadowed foreground the bodies are painted with real unease, and no one at the time knew what we know now, that plague does not in fact pass by touch.