The commission was an attempt to embroider Bonaparte's mythology and quell reports that Napoleon had ordered fifty plague victims in Jaffa be given fatal doses of opium during his retreat from his Syrian expedition.

Dominique Vivant Denon, who participated in Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt and was now director of the musée du Louvre, acted as advisor to Gros on it.

[2] However, Doctor Desgenettes (present in the painting between Napoleon and the patient with the raised arm) wrote that Bonaparte grabbed the sick and helped to transport them.

[3] News of such atrocities contradicted the French justification for their invasions of Ottoman-held Egypt and Syria, namely that it was a mission civilisatrice "that would bring enlightenment to the benighted lands of the East."

To the left, dominated by a typically Egyptian horseshoe arch, a man is richly dressed in the oriental manner hands out bread and is aided by a servant carrying a bread-basket.

On 11 March, Bonaparte made a spectacular visit to his sick soldiers and touched them,[dubious – discuss] which was considered to be either magnificent or suicidal, according to one's point of view on the Napoleonic legend or of the terrors of an age of plagues.

Since the army's arrival in Egypt in July 1798, several French had suffered serious eye problems because of the sand, dust and the extreme light of the sun.

On 23 April 1799, during the Siege of Acre, Bonaparte suggested to Desgenettes, the expedition's chief doctor, that the sick should be administered a fatal-level dose of opium.

In the context of the Troubadour style, especially while Napoleon was becoming emperor, this episode evoked the tradition of the thaumaturgical royal touch which the French kings carried out with sufferers of scrofula.

Since Gros, the artist, was 32 years old at the time at the composition, the shy, naked prisoner behind the patient raising his arm in front of Napoleon may in fact be a hidden self-portrait.