On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Distribution of the Eagles
Jacques Louis David French
David played a central role in staging the spectacles that lent legitimacy to Emperor Napoleon’s regime. Shortly after completing a vast canvas depicting Napoleon’s assumption of imperial power (Louis Léopold Boilly’s painting, also in this gallery, shows that work’s public reception), David was instructed to depict an event in which French troops enacted an oath of loyalty to the emperor. The ceremony involved exchanging the flags from earlier regimes for Napoleon’s emblem of the imperial eagle. This recently discovered preparatory oil sketch allowed the artist to work out the composition and color distribution for the final version, which is more than twenty feet wide.
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