The Battle of Mount Tabor

Louis-François, Baron Lejeune's The Battle of Mount Tabor (1808) depicts a remarkable episode from the Egyptian campaign — the engagement of April 1799 in which a small French force under Kléber resisted a vastly larger Ottoman army near the biblical mountain until Napoleon arrived with relief troops. Lejeune, who participated in the Egyptian campaign as an officer and aide-de-camp, brought firsthand military experience to his reconstruction of the battle. Painted for the Salon of 1808 and now at the Museum of the History of France in Versailles, the work is among his most dramatic productions, set against the extraordinary landscape of the Holy Land.

Lejeune deploys his characteristic panoramic battle composition with the distinctive landscape of Mount Tabor as backdrop — a visual element that gives the scene an exotic gravity unusual in European battle painting. The composition organizes cavalry, infantry, and artillery across multiple overlapping planes, with warm near-Eastern light unifying the scene.