Note 689 — 1831
Reading edition
Haydon, as he tells us in his Autobiography, received a commission from Sir Robert Peel, in December 1830, "to paint Napoleon musing, the size of life." He finished it in June 1831, and thus described it himself:—
"Napoleon was peculiarly alive to poetical association as produced by scenery or sound; village bells with their echoing ding, dong, dang, now bursting full on the ear, now dying in the wind, affected him as they affect everybody alive to natural impressions, and on the eve of all his great battles you find him stealing away in the dead of the night, between the two hosts, and indulging in every species of poetical reverie. It was impossible to think of such a genius in captivity, without mysterious associations of the sky, the sea, the rock, and the solitude with which he was enveloped. I never imagined him but as if musing at dawn, or melancholy at sunset, listening at midnight to the beating and roaring of the Atlantic, or meditating as the stars gazed and the moon shone on him; in short Napoleon never appeared to me but at those seasons of silence and twilight, when nature seems to sympathise with the fallen, and when if there be moments in this turbulent earth fit for celestial intercourse, one must imagine these would be the times immortal spirits might select to descend within the sphere of mortality, to soothe and comfort, to inspire and support the afflicted.
"Under such impressions the present picture was produced.... I imagined him standing on the brow of an impending cliff, and musing on his past fortunes, ... sea-birds screaming at his feet, ... the sun just down, ... the sails of his guard-ship glittering on the horizon, and the Atlantic, calm, silent, awfully deep, and endlessly extensive."—Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, vol. ii. pp. 301, 302.
This picture, one of the noblest which Haydon painted, is still at Drayton Manor.—Ed.