Unknown artist from the original by Giovanni Serangeli

The painting records the two emperors taking leave of each other after the signing of the Peace of Tilsit: Napoleon is seeing Alexander off as the Tsar returns to the Russian bank of the Nieman. For two weeks at Tilsit in East Prussia, the two rulers vied with each other for courtesy, but the peace made between them did not last long. Under the treaty Russia was drawn, against her national interests, into the “continental system”, the blockade of Great Britain. “We repaid affability and politeness with affability and politeness, yet for all that,” Denis Davydov affirmed, “the year 1812 already stood among us Russians, with its bayonet bloody to the barrel, and its knife bloody to the elbow.”