Here Denon has depicted an incident in Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. The two figures on the right in the foreground are probably Napoleon and Denon himself. The kite-flying is a method of getting a thin line over the capital of the column in order to pull up a rope, and then a harness, to haul up a soldier, who would then fly the French colours from the top. The British did exactly the same with their own flags after the defeat of the French forces, and a print exists depicting them doing just this. The kite was not being used to measure the height of the column, as it would have been much simpler and more accurate for Napoleon's surveyors to have done this by basic trigonometry. The red granite column was twenty-two meters high, crowned with an immense capital and visible from a great distance. It was built in AD300 in honour of the Emperor Diocletian, and in medieval times was mistakenly believed to mark the site of a temple of Pompey.

Napoleon's rapid invasion of Egypt in 1798 had far-reaching consequences, even if it was short-lived. Although various travellers had already brought back descriptions and pictures of Egypt ancient and modern, Napoleon commissioned the first large-scale systematic attempt to record that nation and its heritage. He recruited a large group of `Savants', scholars and experts in a variety of fields, who intended to describe every aspect of Egyptian life, its monuments and its culture. They used as their model, both in the scope of their enquiries and in their forms of illustration, the great Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot. Their findings were published in the massive twenty-volume Description de L'Egypte (1809-1822), but long before its appearance, renewed interest in Egypt and its antiquities had swept thorough Europe. Denon himself rushed out his own account of the country in his Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte, 1802, illustrated with his drawings. Denon was an artist, diplomat, author, and an antiquary who became a leading Egyptologist. He was appointed Director-General of Museums in 1804, becoming the first director of the Louvre.