Crossing the Tagliamento, the Line Advances, Antique Madou Lithograph, 1827

An original antique lithograph from Jean-Baptiste Madou's Vie de Napoléon, published at Brussels in 1827, lettered "PASSAGE DU TAGLIAMENTO" in open capitals above the image. Napoleon rides at the center on a white horse among his mounted staff, while at the right a rider on a rearing white horse clutches his head. Infantry press forward in a column at the left past a fallen soldier lying in the foreground, a gun and its crew stand on the rise beyond, and the fighting runs across the wide river plain toward a town in the distance, under heavy banks of cloud and smoke.

The caption below the image, in lithographic script, reads: "Le 16, toute la ligne se mit en mouvement, passa le Tagliamento, et malgré les efforts de l'ennemi, l'armée fut bientôt audelà du fleuve." In English: On the 16th the whole line moved off and crossed the Tagliamento, and despite the efforts of the enemy the army was soon beyond the river.

The plate comes from the first volume of Vie de Napoléon, published at Brussels in 1827 by the Lithographie royale de Jobard, the press of Marcellin Jobard. Its title page describes a text written by a society of men of letters from the new documents dictated and corrected at Saint Helena by Napoleon himself, illustrated with lithographed plates by Jean-Baptiste Madou (1796 to 1877) after painters of the French school. Madou, a Belgian, later became known as a painter of genre scenes.

The crossing took place on 16 March 1797, when Bonaparte forced the line of the Tagliamento in Friuli against the Austrian army of the Archduke Charles. It opened the advance through the eastern Alps toward Vienna, the campaign that ended a month later in the preliminaries of peace signed at Leoben.

The banked cloud and smoke filling the upper half of the sheet carry well across a room, and the plate suits a study, a library or a hallway.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.