Emperor Napoleon I and his staff on horseback

Napoleon and His Staff on Horseback from 1830 at the Rijksmuseum shows Vernet contributing to the Napoleonic image industry that flourished during the July Monarchy, when the new regime of Louis-Philippe made political use of Napoleonic military glory to legitimize its own authority. Napoleon's equestrian image — commanding, assured, seemingly invincible — had been fixed by David and Gros in their celebrated portraits and continued to be reproduced and varied by a generation of painters who understood its emotional power over the French public. Vernet's equestrian expertise, developed through decades of painting military subjects, made his Napoleon particularly convincing in the rendering of horse and rider as a unified image of power. As Director of the French Academy in Rome from 1828 and one of the most prolific history painters of the nineteenth century, his Napoleonic subjects had both artistic authority and political currency. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds this as an important example of French Romantic military painting.

The equestrian composition presents Napoleon with characteristic authority. Vernet's handling of horses and military costume demonstrates his mastery of the military painting genre.