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# Delaroche’s painting of Napoleon crossing the Saint Bernard Pass and the guide’s reward
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/chashche-vsego-napoleona-peresekaiushchego-alpy-predstavliaiut-kak-na-portrete-raboty-zhaka-lui-davida-gordym-vsadnikom-verkhom-na-belom-zherebtse/
- Published: 2023-12-24T07:31:37.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:41:32.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Monarchies, People

Most often Napoleon crossing the Alps is imagined as in the portrait by Jacques-Louis David: a proud horseman astride a white stallion.

Delaroche's painting, created more than thirty years after Napoleon's death, shows the then First Consul crossing the Great St Bernard Pass, the shortest route over the Alps, in order to take the Austrian army in Italy by surprise.

David's propagandistically calibrated and dramatically charged canvas on the same subject was painted in Napoleon's lifetime, at his commission, and naturally under Bonaparte's watchful guidance: he insisted that he be shown crossing the St Bernard on a charger, like Charlemagne. Delaroche chose instead to rely on the account of the historian Adolphe Thiers, published in 1845.

And so here is Napoleon, dressed in civilian clothes, astride a blinkered mule led by a local peasant.

When Napoleon asked his guide what he would like in return for help in crossing the Alps, the man replied that at the age of 22 all he could wish for was simple happiness: a good house, a modest stock of cattle, sheep and the like, which would help him to marry his sweetheart.

Charmed by this modest aspiration, Napoleon ordered that the peasant be given what was, for those times, a decent fortune of 60,000 francs. But it later emerged that the peasant had deceived Napoleon: in fact he was already married, already owned a house, and was really 27 years old. The disappointed Napoleon then cut the reward to 1,200 francs.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_10758@24-12-2023_10-31-37.jpg)