Son of miniature painters Jean-Antoine Gros and Madeleine-Cécile Durand
With his parents
Often visited Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun’s studio
With Jacques-Louis David (1785-93); Académie Royale (1787-93)
1792 – finalist in Prix de Rome competition with Antiochus Attempting to Prevent Eleazar from Eating an Impure Dish (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Saint-Lo)
1793 –French Academy in Rome closes due to anti-French demonstrations; Gros and Anne-Louis Girodet lodge together in Genoa
1796 –meets Napoleon and Josephine; begins series of propagandistic Bonaparte commissions; Napoleon appoints Gros to committee inspecting art works from conquered cities for inclusion in the Louvre
1801-1835 – exhibits regularly at Paris Salon
1809 – marries painter Augustine Dufresne
1814 – Bourbon restoration; appointed Portrait Painter to Louis XVIII; paintings of Napoleon removed from public exhibition
1815 – Gros becomes member of Institut de France
1824 – ennobled (baron) by Charles X based on frescoes for Panthéon cupola of Clovis, Charlemagne, Louix IX, Louis XVIII (begun 1812)
1830 – July Revolution; Gros's Napoleon paintings return to public view
1835 – Gros drowns himself in the Seine river following negative reception at 1838 Salon
Antoine-Louis Barye, Richard Parkes Bonington, Thomas Couture, Paul Delaroche, and Paul Huet
Genoa (1793-1800), also visits Florence and Milan
Napoleon Bonaparte
Louis XVIII (King of France)
Charles X (King of France)
Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole, 1801 (Château de Versailles)
Battle of the Pyramids, 1810 (Château de Versailles)
Bacchus Consoling Ariadne on the Island of Naxos, 1821 (National Gallery, Ottawa)
smarthistory: Napoleon in the Pesthouse at Jaffa
Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization in Gros’s Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804),” Representations, no. 51 (Summer 1995): 1-46
McCoubrey, John Walker. “Gros' Battle of Eylau and Roman Imperial Art,“ The Art Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 2 (June 1961): 135-9
O’Brien, David. After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros: Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006
O’Brien, David. “Propaganda and the Republic of the Arts in Antoine-Jean Gros’s Napoleon Visiting the Battlefield of Eylau the Morning after the Battle,” French Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 281-314
Prendergast, Christopher. Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros’s La Bataille d’Eylau. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997