Portrait d'Antoine-Jean Gros à l'âge de vingt ans

This portrait of Gros at age twenty at the Musée des Augustins may be a self-portrait or a portrait by a fellow student from David’s atelier. The young artist’s features, captured at the beginning of a career that would make him the visual chronicler of the Napoleonic era, reveal the ambition and sensitivity that characterized his art. Characteristic of the artist's mature approach, the work displays monumental scale, vivid reportorial color, Romantic energy in figure groups, combining David's Neoclassical training with the excitement of actual military events.

The youthful portrait demonstrates solid academic training in the neoclassical tradition. Careful rendering of features and subtle tonal modeling show the technical foundation on which Gros would build his Romantic innovations.