Napoleon and History Painting : Antoine-Jean Gros's La Bataille d'Eylau

This is the first full-length study of Antoine-Jean Gros from an art-historical point of view, but it is more than a monograph. It uses the example of Gros to examine a more general crisis of history painting at a time (the Napoleonic period) of major political and cultural transition. Christopher Prendergast is a distinguished scholar of international standing.

This study is an inquiry into the fortunes, in both theory and practice, of the idea of history painting during the Napoleonic period. Its main argument is that under Napoleon, French history painting, especially battle painting, encountered a series of questions as to its nature and function. These questions arose in part from the (often contradictory) demands of a propaganda-machine operating within a postrevolutionary crisis of political legitimation, but also from changes in artistic taste which both retained and re-directed an earlier notion of the civic responsibilities of the history painter. This is a resolutely interdisciplinary book: drawing on perspectives from political thought and history, military theory and practice and art history, it centres on the work of the painter, Antoine-Jean Gros, and his controversial painting, La Bataille d''Eylau.