It depicts a moment from the aftermath of the bloody Battle of Eylau (7–8 February 1807) in which Napoleon Bonaparte surveys the battlefield where his Grande Armée secured a costly victory against the Russians.

In early February 1807, the Imperial Russian Army, under the command of Levin August von Bennigsen, was in full retreat while being pursued by Napoléon Bonaparte's Grande Armée.

[2] After some failed attempts to disrupt the French advance, Bennigsen decided to regroup his retreating forces at the Prussian village of Eylau (now Bagrationovsk, Kaliningrad Oblast).

[2] Napoléon sought to ensure that the victory at Eylau, though costly, would not be forgotten, entrusting the director of the Louvre Vivant Denon with commissioning an artist as a part of a much larger propaganda campaign.

Initially, some politicians suspected the painting aimed to portray the Emperor unfavorably, but Napoléon himself approved of Gros's work and presented him with the Légion d'honneur at the painter's award ceremony.

[6] Gros's depiction of Napoléon displayed a degree of realism not present in his earlier painting of the Emperor, Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa (1804), nor those by any other artist.

In its portrayal of the unpleasant truth of war, Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau breaks with the prevailing style of Neoclassicism and was an early landmark in the emerging Romantic movement.