General Jean-Baptiste Kléber and Egyptian Family (Sketches for "The Battle of the Pyramids") (c. 1835): Art, History and Details

General Jean-Baptiste Kléber and Egyptian Family (Sketches for "The Battle of the Pyramids") (c. 1835) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Antoine-Jean Gros (French, 1771–1835).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In 1810, Gros exhibited a massive painting of Napoleon at the 1798 Battle of the Pyramids, one of the rare French triumphs in the failed campaign to conquer Egypt (1789-1801). After Napoleon first fell from power in 1814, the painting went into storage, until the new king Louis-Philippe chose to resurrect it for a history museum in Paris. However, perhaps to diminish Napoleon's significance, the government asked Gros to amplify the original with an addition at each end. This painting incorporates General Kléber, a famously successful military leader who had been excluded from the original painting.

Object facts

• Title: General Jean-Baptiste Kléber and Egyptian Family (Sketches for "The Battle of the Pyramids")
• Date: c. 1835
• Creator attribution: Antoine-Jean Gros (French, 1771–1835)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on linen
• Dimensions: Framed: 377.2 x 126 x 12 cm (148 1/2 x 49 5/8 x 4 3/4 in.); Unframed: 352.1 x 97.8 cm (138 5/8 x 38 1/2 in.); Former: 306 x 98 cm (120 1/2 x 38 9/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1972.17

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1972.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 60, no. 3 (March 1973): 63–115.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.