Pierre Gautherot

With Talabardon & Gautier, Paris;

Where acquired by the present owner.

The present work is in all likelihood the final preparatory work for the painting exhibited at the 1810 (probably sold at Sotheby’s London on 14 November 1973, lot 50; present location unknown). Their composition is practically identical, with only a few details differentiating them, mostly in the background. It is centred on the two sovereigns taking leave of each other after their meeting. In front of a pavilion (topped with the letter N in our painting), Napoleon is in the centre, seen from the front, wearing his uniform as colonel of the Chasseurs de la Garde, shaking the hand of the Tsar, seen from the back, in his uniform as a colonel of the Infantry. A bright light illuminates the two sovereigns, the most powerful in Europe, as though to emphasize their joint desire to establish peace through diplomacy. On either side, the French and Russian escorts are waiting for the sovereigns.

The meeting took place on a raft in the middle of the river Neman, halfway between Russia and Prussia. The bridge joining the two banks had been burnt by the Russians to cut off the French advance – its charred remains can be seen in the foreground. This important detail was inspired by the account of a witness, probably Dominique-Vivant Denon, Director General of the Museum Central des Arts, later the Musée du Louvre, whose presence at Tilsit is attested on 29 June 1807. His correspondence informs us that he supplied Gautherot with a drawing he had made himself in situ.

Gautherot, who was one of the painters charged with illustrating the Napoleonic saga, was commissioned for the painting in 1809: it was to decorate the Galerie de Diane in the Palais des Tuileries. A first series had been painted but rejected by Napoleon, apart from Napoleon receiving the keys of Vienna by Girodet (Musée de l’Histoire de France, Versailles, inv. MV 1549). He asked Dominique-Vivant Denon to commission seven further paintings for this decorative scheme, including those by Gautherot.

Although in the years 1806 to 1810, at the Empire’s peak, imperial propaganda still required vast canvasses presenting Napoleon as a military leader and conqueror, there was also a considerable demand for works that showed the Emperor interacting on an equal basis with the hereditary sovereigns of Europe, who were forced to accept Napoleon’s superiority now that he was master of Europe. Several artists painted the meeting at Tilsit, including Adolphe Roehn (1808), Gioacchino Serangeli (1810) and Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret in 1810 (all three in the Musée de l’Histoire de France, Versailles).

The Treaty of Tilsit was signed on 7 July 1807 by Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I, following the victory of the Grande Armée at Friedland in June 1807. It had significant repercussions on Europe. The treaty cut Prussia off from part of its own territory and allowed Napoleon to redraw the map of Europe, creating among other things the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Westphalia, while leaving Russia to take Finland. However, the Franco-Russian alliance collapsed in 1810 and two years later, Napoleon embarked on the disastrous Russian campaign.

The figure of the emperor was the subject of a lithograph after a drawing sometimes attributed to Denon, while Charles Motte produced a lithograph of the final composition.