Bonaparte Crossing the Alps

Bonaparte Crossing the Alps is an 1848 to 1850 oil on canvas painting by the French artist Paul Delaroche, now in the Louvre in Paris, with further versions in the Louvre-Lens and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. It shows Napoleon Bonaparte leading his army across the Alps on a mule in the spring of 1800, moving to surprise Austrian forces in Italy. Delaroche painted it as a deliberately more realistic answer to an earlier five painting series on the same crossing by Jacques-Louis David, which had shown Napoleon calm astride a rearing horse rather than plodding by mule; the Liverpool version was commissioned by Arthur George, the third Earl of Onslow, after he and Delaroche viewed David's original together at the Louvre. Queen Victoria owned a small version of the composition. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/