The Age of Napoleon

The relentlessly ambitious French general Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) parlayed his legendary reputation as a military strategist into a ruthless quest for imperial domination within and beyond Europe. The suffering and destruction wrought by Napoleon’s military campaigns loom large in Francisco de Goya’s print series The Disasters of War. Subtitled “Fatal Consequences,” the album of eighty prints chronicles the horrors of the Peninsular War from 1808 to 1814 between Spain and France, including atrocities committed against civilians and a terrible famine in Madrid.