An extensive wooded landscape with cavalrymen escorting a wagon train

The artist had a precocious start to his career: having studied with his father, Franois Louis Swebach, and Michel Duplessis in Paris, he exhibited for the first time at the Salon de la Correspondence at the age of fourteen, and also participated in the Exposition de la Jeunesse in the same year. Assuming the pseudonyme, Des Fontaines, he became a prominent portraitist of the Bonaparte family and in 1810 won the Grand Prix at the Salon for his Napoléon crossing the Danube. He specialised in military subjects, and between 1802 and 1813 he was the leading painter at the Sèvres porcelein factory.