This aspect of Napoleon's personality would indirectly lead to the Impressionist movement later in the 19th Century. Napoleon recognized that with territorial conquest, he would be better off winning the hearts and minds of conquered peoples, and consequently tried to avoid as much as possible, his armies from foraging local foodstuffs as they moved along. This led to efforts on his part to have methods of food preservation developed to sustain his armies in the field. One technique proposed was foil tubes, which proved marginal as a means of food preservation, but turned out to be very effective as a means of storing and transporting oil paints.
If you look at landscape painting up and into the 19th century, they were virtually all executed in studios from sketches the artists had made in the field as oil paints are very messy, and particularly at the time, pigments tended to be very expensive. It made far more sense for the artist to mix his oils in the studio on an as needed basis and paint there. Foil tubes, for the first time, made it possible for artists to take their paints, a canvas and an easel on-site and paint their observations directly without intermediate sketches...
