Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa (French: Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa) is an 1804 painting commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte from Antoine-Jean Gros to portray an event during the Egyptian Campaign. The scene shows Napoleon during a striking scene which occurred in Jaffa on 11 March 1799, when then General Bonaparte made a daring and spectacular visit to his sick soldiers at the Armenian Saint Nicholas Monastery. It was an attempt to quell unsavoury rumours that Napoleon had ordered that fifty incurable dying plague victims in Jaffa be given fatal doses of opium during his retreat from his Syrian expedition.

This is part of the collection of French paintings at the Louvre.

On 18 September 1804, the painting was exhibited at the Salon de Paris, between Napoleon's proclamation as emperor on 18 May and his coronation at Notre-Dame de Paris on 2 December. 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.

This painting uses elements of the composition of Jacques-Louis David's 1784 Oath of the Horatii, also held at the Louvre, such as the three arcades from Oath which defined three different worlds (the three sons making the oath in the left one; the father brandishing the swords in the middle; the women abandoned to sadness in the right-hand one), a principle taken up in this painting too.

It is sometimes mistaken to be set in a mosque but is actually set in the Armenian Saint Nicholas Monastery, whose courtyard can be seen in the background. Further into the background are the walls of Jaffa, with a breached tower above which flies an oversized French flag. The smoke from a fire, or excessive cannon smoke, dominates the town.

To the left, dominated by a typically Arabic art, a man richly dressed in the oriental manner hands out bread, aided by a servant carrying a bread-basket. Behind them, two black men carry a stretcher, on which is a form, probably a cadaver. The two-coloured arcade opens out on a gallery full of the sick.

To the right, under two arcades, under a broken arch, is Napoleon, accompanied by his officers, touching the armpit bubo presented to him by one of the sick. In front of him, an Arab doctor is caring for another sick man, while a blind man struggles to approach the general. The bottom of the painting is occupied by prostrate and extended men. The light of the painting and the play of colours all paint Bonaparte's gesture in the best possible light.

The capture and violent sack of Jaffa by the French army under Bonaparte on 7 March 1799 were rapidly followed by an outbreak of bubonic plague, identified by January 1799, which decimated the army. On 11 March, Bonaparte made a spectacular visit to his sick soldiers, touching them, 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.

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