1798
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Dominant colour
Vue de la colonne de Pompée à Alexandrie is a 1798 watercolor by Dominique Vivant Denon, a Romanticism work, depicting Column, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
Denon painted this watercolor in 1798 during Napoleon’s Egypt campaign. It shows a tall red granite column in Alexandria with two figures nearby—likely Napoleon and Denon himself. Their team uses a kite to fly a line over the column’s capital so a soldier can climb up and raise the French flag. The British later copied this exact trick after beating the French. It wasn’t for measuring height—they had better tools. Look up the Victoria and Albert Museum next.
Dominique Vivant Denon’s 1798 drawing depicts an episode from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, showing two figures in the foreground who may be Napoleon and the artist himself. The scene illustrates the use of a kite to lift a line over the capital of the red granite Pompey’s Column, a twenty-two-meter structure built in AD 300 to honor Emperor Diocletian and mistaken in medieval times for marking Pompey’s temple. The column, crowned with an imposing capital and visible from afar, served as a symbolic vantage point for displaying French colors, a practice later repeated by British forces after…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon was a French artist, writer, diplomat, author, and archaeologist.
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