Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa
Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa (French: Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa) is an 1804 painting commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte by Antoine-Jean Grosto portray an event during the Egyptian Campaign.
The scene shows Napoleon during a striking scene which is supposed to have occurred in Jaffa on 11 March 1799, depicting then General Bonaparte making a visit to his sick soldiers at the Armenian Saint Nicholas Monastery. The commission was an attempt to embroider Bonaparte's mythology and quell reports that Napoleon had ordered fifty plague victims in Jaffa be given fatal doses of opium during his retreat from his Syrian expedition.
On 18 September 1804, the painting was exhibited at the Salon de Paris, between Napoleon's proclamation as emperor on 18 May and his coronation at Notre-Dame de Paris on 2 December. Dominique Vivant Denon, who participated in Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt and was now director of the musée du Louvre, acted as advisor to Gros on it.
Composition This painting uses elements of the composition of Jacques-Louis David's 1784 Oath of the Horatii, also held at the Louvre, such as the three arcades from Oath which defined three different worlds (the three sons making the oath in the left one; the father brandishing the swords in the middle; the women abandoned to sadness in the right-hand one), a principle taken up in this painting too.
It is sometimes mistaken to be set in a mosque but is actually set in the Armenian Saint Nicholas Monastery, whose courtyard can be seen in the background. Further into the background are the walls of Jaffa, with a breached tower above which flies an oversized French flag. The smoke from a fire, or excessive cannon smoke, dominates the town.
To the left, dominated by a typically Egyptian horseshoe arch, a man richly dressed in the oriental manner hands out bread, aided by a servant carrying a bread-basket. Behind them, two black men carry a stretcher, on which is a form, probably a cadaver. The two-coloured arcade opens out on a gallery full of the sick.
To the right, under two arcades, under a broken arch, is Napoleon, accompanied by his officers, touching the armpit bubo presented to him by one of the sick. In front of him, an Arab doctor is caring for another sick man, while a blind man struggles to approach the general. The bottom of the painting is occupied by prostrate and extended men. The light of the painting and the play of colours all paint Bonaparte's gesture in the best possible light.