La Bataille des Pyramides

Gros painted this in 1810, when Napoleon was emperor and near the peak of his power, but the battle it shows had happened 12 years earlier, on 21 July 1798, in the sands outside Cairo. The French Senate ordered the picture in 1809, and it went on show at the Paris Salon the next year. It is frankly a work of promotion, meant to remind everyone how the young general had swept a French army into Egypt. Gros builds it around motion and dust, cavalry breaking against infantry, the pyramids planted plainly on the horizon so no one could miss where this happened. He had not witnessed the fighting himself. He worked, as court painters did, from reports and from the story the regime wanted told.