Napoleon Crossing The Alps Painting Analysis

Describe: This portrait is an oil painting on canvas. It is located in the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. The subject in the foreground is an African American man mounted on a rearing horse in the style of Napoleon Bonaparte. The painting has a decorative, Baroque theme that looks very much like wallpaper in the painting’s background, reminiscent of luxurious French fabric. The background is also filled with tiny paintings of sperm which is Wiley’s way of parodying the style of art traditionally seen in Western portraiture which is filled with masculine figures. The whole painting is set in an elaborate gold colored frame, just as many European portraits of rulers were framed. This sets the tone for the portrait.Inspiration: The obvious inspiration for this painting was Jacques-Louis David’s painting called Napoleon Crossing the Alps. It was originally specially made for Charles IV, who is the King of Spain, to celebrate Napoleon’s winning military campaign against the Austrians . The original portrait is an embodiment of propaganda. Wiley asks us to think about the biases in the set of works that are regarded as “masterpieces” and the representation in pop culture, and issues of race and gender .Analyse: This piece is extremely photo-realistic, painted using light and shade and highlighting the foreground using a colorful background, Wiley repeats the figures in the background to enhance the painting. He frequently uses backlighting to emphasize the dimensionality of his …show more content…
I like the way the artist constantly places the subject in the middle of the foreground because it’s extremely eye catching and the colour combinations are not what an artist would usually expect or combine yet, Wiley utilises the colour scheme