The Invalid and the Emperor
On Horace Vernet's "Napoléon aux Tuileries"
Hello lovely readers and welcome to Idiot Parade.
Today’s newsletter is the latest installment in our monthly dalliance into art analysis, which debuted in December with Robert Gence’s Portrait de chasseresse. Although this micro-series might appear somewhat stuck on French figurative paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, I promise it will, in time, feature a roster of artworks that span mediums, eras, and countries of origin. Scout’s honor.
Every artist is the product and prisoner of their times, but few have such precise timing as the French painter Horace Vernet. Vernet was born at the Louvre in 1789 amidst the first blush of revolution, his June 30 birthday situated squarely between the formation of the National Assembly and the storming of the Bastille. His father, Carle Vernet, was a successful painter in his own right, and under such tutelage he emerged an artistic prodigy during the zenith of the French Empire and Napoleonic power.
His father and l’Empereur proved decisive influences, in that Vernet remained a working artist and a Bonapartist for the rest of his life. He produced dozens of battle paintings, not just of the Napoleonic Wars but also of the French conquest of Algeria, the Crimean War, the War of Austrian Succession, and the Reconquista. Baudelaire famously derided him as un militaire qui fait de la peinture—a soldier who paints. I imagine Vernet took this as a compliment.
Long after his death in exile in 1821, Napoleon remained a fixture of Vernet’s oeuvre. Vernet’s Napoleon was not the steely-eyed demigod of Jacques-Louis David, draped perpetually in glory and occasionally in velvet and furs, but a man of action in the world. Throughout the early 1830s Vernet painted Napoleon in the hours before victory, commanding the battlefields of Friedland and Wagram. Vernet’s compositions, although deliberate, possess a certain urgency and momentary feeling. His depiction of Napoleon at Jena does not depict the Emperor observing the routing of a Prussian cavalry regiment but reprimanding his own Imperial Guard, his back all but turned on the viewer.
Vernet can be banal. The emotions of his Napoleon paintings typically flatter their star. What determination—humility, even!—Napoleon demonstrates at Jena by reprimanding his own guard. How utterly beloved Napoleon must be, if an officer will forgo decorum during the final farewell at Fontainebleau and throw his arms around the Emperor’s waist, his hat tumbling unceremoniously to the ground. The Vernet-ian moment is one of manufactured spontaneity and high drama. It’s perfected in Napoléon aux Tuileries. It’s also destroyed by it.
Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas I and completed in 1838, Napoléon aux Tuileries is, first and foremost, enormous: roughly seven feet wide and 10.5 feet high. In it, Napoleon emerges from a cluster of high-ranking officers (including Murat, Junot, and Duroc) to inspect the Imperial Guard. He’s confronted by a veteran invalid flanked by two young boys. Encased in wood, the stump of the invalid’s amputated leg protrudes from underneath the hem of his uniform. We cannot see the man’s face as he waves a petition in Napoleon’s direction.
The invalid’s appearance creates an extraordinary tension. His gesture simultaneously resembles a Roman salute and the waving of a white flag of surrender; it is both a fervent plea and a provocation. He has only just caught Napoleon’s attention, whose horse is still turning the opposite direction. Between Napoleon and the invalid passes a moment of destabilizing recognition, and several officers eye their commander, awaiting his reaction.
The invalid is an inconvenient truth in the flesh, a fly in the ointment. Napoleon is as responsible for the glory of all France—its engine here assembled into a faceless, bayoneted war machine—as he is the invalid’s despair. As such, the invalid’s presence and self-assertion not only shatters the neat symmetry of this choreographed display of military strength but any moral certainty therein.
Napoleon regards the invalid with a flat, even expression. His right hand remains at his side. With his left he pulls back on the reins of his horse, not tightly enough to draw the reins taut. His next move is uncertain; whether or not he recognizes the invalid as symbolic is unknowable. Overhead, puffy sunlit clouds darken into an afternoon storm.
Is Napoleon the father of the nation or the grand architect of its destruction? Vernet brings us to the absolute edge of that question and leaves us there. Perhaps he could not bear to answer it himself. Instead he gives us a rare image in which a nameless invalid is granted as much visual and symbolic weight as the conqueror of Europe. Napoléon aux Tuileries is Vernet’s apologia. We should know better than to love the tyrant. And yet, we do.