Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Jacques-Louis David, 1801

David painted this image five separate times between 1801 and 1805. The first version, the one this reproduction is drawn from, was commissioned not by Napoleon himself but by King Charles IV of Spain, who was assembling a hall of military portraits and wanted Bonaparte among them as a gesture of goodwill between the two states. Napoleon liked the result enough to commission three further copies for his own palaces, and David kept a fifth for his own studio.

Napoleon never sat for the portrait. He refused, and David worked instead from an earlier likeness, though Bonaparte did offer one piece of direction: he wanted to be shown calm, astride a spirited horse. What David delivered was pure theatre, a rearing charger and a wind-whipped cloak, and it bears almost no relationship to what actually happened on the Great St. Bernard Pass in May of 1800. Napoleon crossed on a sure-footed mule, led by a local peasant guide, well after the bulk of his army had already gone through.

The five versions now sit scattered across Europe: the Château de Malmaison outside Paris, the Palace of Versailles, Vienna's Belvedere, and Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, a spread that mirrors how widely Napoleon used the image itself, distributing it to allied courts as a piece of calculated political image-making rather than documentary record.

Source: Musée national du Château de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison.