The Final Spectacle: Military Painting under the Second Empire, 1855-1867 9783110497489, 9783110486681

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The Final Spectacle

Julia Thoma

The Final Spectacle Military Painting under the Second Empire, 1855–1867

ISBN 978-3-11-048668-1 eISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-049748-9 eISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-049509-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956403 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Layout and typesetting: Petra Florath, Stralsund Copyediting: Kristie Kachler Cover illustration: Adolphe Yvon, La gorge de Malakoff (8 septembre 1855) (campagne de Crimée), 1859, oil on canvas, 500 × 750 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents

VII

Acknowledgements

IX

Abstract

   1

Introduction

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I  Military Paintings in 1855

  15

Historical background: Napoleon III’s politics and the Universal Exhibition of 1855

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Vernet’s career as illustrated by the retrospective of 1855

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Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

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Vernet’s art in the service of the Second Empire

  67

II  The Second Empire’s Inf luence on Military Paintings

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Plates

121

III  Painting the Crimean War

121

Historical Background

132

The failure of traditional compositions in depictions of the Battle of the Alma

147

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles

163

The Salle de Crimée’s centrepiece: Yvon’s three Malakoff paintings

202

General Bosquet’s ‘mouvement tournant’ in Pils’ 1861 Bataille de l’Alma

211

Outside the Salle de Crimée: Pils’ portrayal of the soldiers’ suffering in Tranchée devant Sébastopol (1855)

VI

Table of Contents

221

IV  Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino (1861) and the Decline of the Spectacular Mode

221

Historical background of the Campaign of Italy (1859)

235

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

255

The status of military painting at the Salon of 1861

264

Back to the heroic struggle in Magenta (1863): Yvon’s failed attempt to restore his reputation as a military painter

272

Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino (1864): A solution to painting modern warfare

281

V  Genre Paintings of Military Subjects

282

Subjectivity in Meissonier’s Solférino (1864) and Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (1839)

285

The history of genre painting

292

A fine line: Sentimentalism in military genre paintings by Bellangé and Protais

298

Male companionship and allusions to homoeroticism in military genre paintings

304

The evocation of anti-war sentiments in Protais’ early military genre paintings

306

The image of national sacrifice in Protais’ Le matin and Le soir at the Salon of 1863

312

Linking the army and civilian society?

316

Protais’ Fin de la Halte (1864) and the vulnerable male body

320

Protais’ assimilation of previous criticism in Les vainqueurs (1865)

325

Tipping over into sentimentalism: Protais’ Le soldat blessé (1866)

331

Conclusion

339 357

Bibliography Image Credits

Acknowledgements

The present book is a lightly revised version of my PhD dissertation, submitted at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2013. Its title, Military Painting under the Second Empire, suggests the broad scope covered: the entire corpus of French military painting during the two decades of Napoleon III’s martial regime. Given the breadth of the study as well as my attempt to bring together various discplines and methodologies to contextualise the importance of military paintings at this moment in history, publications touching on individual aspects of my study have naturally proliferated since early 2013, when my thesis was essentially completed. I have included the most relevant contributions in my bibliography and f lagged them in the footnotes. For their support in helping me to realise my dissertation and its publication, I would like to extend my gratitude to numerous institutions and individuals. John House’s consistent encouragement and enthusiasm for my research subject first led me to embark on this project. I am very grateful for having had the privilege to benefit from his vast knowledge and inspiring way of thinking about art history. I owe a special debt of thanks to Satish Padiyar for having taken over the supervision of my thesis in such a proactive and inspiring way. Working with him has been a real joy, and his generous guidance and commitment as well as incisive readings of drafts have truly enriched my work. I thank Melanie Vandenbrouck for having been my mentor and critic and for our discussions on Vernet. I also wish to thank Stephanie Buck for her support and for consistently challenging me. I benefitted enormously from the intellectual stimulation and critical feedback of other colleagues and friends, including Wolf Burchard, Mary Camp, Martina Caruso, Anna Fukuda, Ashley Robertson Givens, Harriet Griffith, Katie Hornstein, Nancy Ireson, Maud Jacquin, Alister Mill, Lois Oliver, Edward Payne, Virginia Rounding and Rachel Sloan. My thesis was financially supported by a Dr Martin Halusa Scholarship. Outside the art history realm, a multitude of individuals have assisted with this project. I wish particularly to thank the historian Orlando Figes for engaging with my research about the Crimean War and for sharing his knowledge as I planned a travel route to the battlefields and memorials in the Crimea in 2012. General Sir Hugh

VIII

Acknowledgements

Beach’s expertise in military history often opened up new interpretations of the paintings treated. In France, I would like to thank collectively the committed staff in museums, archives and libraries who have taken the time to respond to my questions, assist me in my hunt for reproductions of paintings that are rolled up or lost and granted me free image rights. I am especially indebted to Frédéric Lacaille, curator for nineteenthcentury paintings in Versailles, who continuously lent his insights to my research over the course of my thesis and beyond. I also owe much gratitude to Gilles Dupont, a specialist on Alexandre Protais, who shared his knowledge of the artist’s biography. My thesis would not have been published without the feedback and inspiring viva discussion with my external examiners, Susan Siegfried and Tom Gretton. For realising the publication of my thesis at De Gruyter, my thanks go to Katja Richter, Anja Weisenseel and Kristie Kachler. I owe a vast debt of gratitude to my family, who have been consistently encouraging and generously supportive. The thesis and its publication would not have been possible without the unconditional support and love from Konrad Thoma.

Abstract

Under the title ‘The Final Spectacle: Military Painting under the Second Empire, 1855– 1867’, this book explores how newly invented formal strategies allowed the genre of military painting to remain the conduit of sociopolitical endeavours despite the evolving technologies of news coverage. Its reference point is the Universal Exhibition of 1855, where the critical reception of Horace Vernet’s (1789–1863) retrospective exhibition highlighted the political implications of his unprecedented artistic strategies for visualising war. The study traces Vernet’s artistic legacy and the inf luence of the newly emergent spectacle culture in the œuvres of the next generation of artists – among them Adolphe Yvon (1817–1893), Isidore Pils (1813–1875) and Alexandre Protais (1826– 1890) –, who were asked to commemorate the Second Empire’s military exploits on canvas. The Crimean War (1853–1856) in particular gave rise to a new era in the genre of military painting when the arts administration asked eighteen artists to contribute forty-four paintings to a Salle de Crimée in Versailles. Having to win over public opinion that was still f luctuating between resentment at the young Empire’s failure to keep its initial peace promises and acceptance of the semi-successful outcome of the war as having restored France’s glory, the paintings cover a range of genres and are eclectic in style, from confrontational pictorial rhetoric to landscape paintings of the war’s terrain that distance the viewer from the military conf lict. The room has not been given the scholarly attention that it deserves, considering that this major project formed an important part of Napoleon III’s populist politics and was artistically innovative. Moving on to the commemoration of the Italian Campaign (1859), Chapter IV examines public opinion to explain why the large propaganda piece La bataille de Solférino (Salon of 1861) commissioned from Adolphe Yvon was a critical failure that heralded the decline of military painting as public spectacle. The last chapter looks at genre paintings that f lourished at the Salons of the 1860s, such as Alexandre Protais’ Les vainqueurs (1865), which adapted sentimental techniques of military memoirs to focus on common soldiers’ experiences of warfare. Ending with these politically ambiguous paintings – portrayals of suffering soldiers could elicit

X

Abstract

nationalist sympathy or produce a horrified recoil from the brutality of war – the study spans a period that saw a diverse employment of artistic strategies in military painting conditioned by a changing political landscape, from the Universal Exposition of 1855 to the Universal Exposition of 1867.

Introduction

The Second Empire (1852–1870) was one of the most martial periods in the history of nineteenth-century France. This is ref lected in the fact that military paintings received a new lease of life under the regime, becoming so central to it that contemporary art critics referred to them as peinture officielle. This was usually the first genre a visitor to the Salons of the Second Empire would have encountered, with large formats measuring up to six by nine metres dominating the central room. This visibility contributed to military paintings becoming the focus of the ‘battlefield’, as Théophile Gautier described the Salon in 1861, ‘where enemy canvases competed ardently for victory in the middle of the tumult of criticism and praise’.1 With their depictions of contemporary events, military paintings polarised conf licting views on art like no other genre. They were indispensable to the Second Empire’s populist politics, lucrative for artists, prestigious for the generals depicted in them, and popular with a varied public; they were, however, despised by critics, who felt that the paintings lacked artistic freedom. Propagandist interests in commissioned paintings as political instruments clashed with intellectual concerns about the decline of the high-art genre of history painting. Both the government and social commentators used the paintings as vehicles to present or discuss political agendas, often necessarily veiled due to the climate of strict press censorship. Alongside these intellectual concerns was the sensationalism of an emerging consumer culture, which the government, eager to diffuse potential opposition by providing show and spectacle, sought to exploit and encourage. The artist, as the producer of this shared visual experience, was compelled to negotiate between these tensions. In the case of now virtually forgotten artists such as Adolphe Yvon, Isidore Pils and Alexandre Protais, this dilemma gave rise to strikingly innovative compositions.2 1

2

‘un champ de bataille où des tableaux ennemis se disputaient ardemment la victoire au milieu d’un tumulte de critiques et d’éloges’, Théophile Gautier, Abécédaire du Salon de 1861 (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), 5. All translations are by the author. Military paintings from before and after the period covered in this study have been the subject of extensive scholarship, which has included monographs as well as collective studies. See Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orléanist France,

2

Introduction

Even if most critics agreed that few paintings in the genre would, as A.-J. Du Pays put it, ‘leave a durable trace in art’, it was taken for granted that military paintings were invaluable for the future as historical documents.3 In 1861, Oliver Merson noted that military paintings ‘respond to the popular instincts that necessarily demand to be satisfied. In fact, the army plays an immense role in the modern glory of France; it represents the people’. Merson concluded that it was the military painter’s responsibility to ‘write for the future generations some of the heroic pages of our history’.4 Paradoxically, the paintings – despite having attracted the crowds at the Salons – were quickly forgotten. Already by the 1860s, in the wake of growing calls for peace, the public had grown weary of these large propaganda machines of the Second Empire’s apparent military grandeur and power, which seemed increasingly theatrical. The void was filled by the brief 1860s vogue for military genre paintings showing individual soldiers off-duty, which used the soldier’s suffering body as an indicator of the virtuous defence of the nation but which soon fell into obscurity like their more spectacular predecessors. Now unpopular and not forming part of museum collections as they were painted mainly for the market, many of these military genre paintings have gone missing – which is surely one of the reasons why they have been largely ignored by scholars. The present study discusses these genre paintings even though some of them survive only as prints, for they played a prominent part in art critics’ reviews of the Salons. Limited hanging space and changing tastes have also led to the relegation of many large-scale battle paintings to Versailles’ storage vaults. Yvon’s trio of paintings of the Crimean War (Salons of 1857 and 1859), for example, are currently rolled up, thus denying spectators the chance to experience their enveloping immensity. A few critics anticipated this fate of military paintings. Maxime Du Camp was proved correct when

3 4

1830–1848 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Christopher Prendergast, Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros’s La Bataille d’Eylau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); essays in Bilder der Macht – Macht der Bilder: Zeitgeschichte in Darstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. Stefan Germer and Michael F. Zimmermann (Munich and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997); François Robichon, L’armée française vue par les peintres, 1870–1914 (Paris: Herscher: Ministère de la défense, 2000); Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Melanie Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful: Representing the Conquest of Algeria, 1830–1848 (PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2009); François Robichon, Alphonse de Neuville, 1835–1885 (Paris: N. Chaudun: Ministère de la défense, 2010); Katie Hornstein, Episodes in Political Illusion: The Proliferation of War Imagery in France (1804–1856) (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2010). ‘laisse si rarement une trace durable dans l’art’, A.-J. Du Pays, ‘Salon de 1861’, L’Illustration 37, no. 950 (11 May 1861), 295. ‘répondent à des instincts populaires qui demandent impérieusement à être satisfaits. En effet, l’armée a dans la gloire moderne de la France une part immense; elle représente le peuple’, ‘écrit pour les générations futures quelques-unes des pages héroïques de notre histoire.’ Olivier Merson, Exposition de 1861: La Peinture en France (Paris: E. Dentu, Librairie de la Société des Gens de lettres, 1861), 93–94.

Introduction

he wrote in 1861 that they ‘would quietly find their place in the storerooms of Versailles, and no one will pay attention to them anymore. That is the destiny of battle paintings that are in general to the fine arts what the daily news sections of a newspaper are to history.’5 * During the Second Empire, when the works were still on public display at the Salons, most art critics discussed them in their Salon reviews, even if only to dismiss the genre in terms of taste or to set forth a political agenda. Discussions of the aesthetics of military paintings were inevitably politicised and used as a mode of either praising or criticising the regime’s military policies.6 The terminology was therefore f luid, with critics usually subsuming battles and military genre scenes under umbrella terms such as peinture de bataille or peinture militaire. Critics such as Gautier and Houssaye, writing for a variety of journals including the Second Empire’s official organ, the Moniteur universel, were generally advocates of military painting. Théophile Gautier dedicated a chapter to the genre in his Salon de 1861, declaring that ‘battle painting is incidentally a separate genre and very modern’7 while Houssaye published several passages on military paintings in his Salon reviews throughout the Second Empire. In 1876, on the occasion of a retrospective of Isidore Pils’ work at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Houssaye published a long article retrospectively analysing the history of the genre in the Revue des deux mondes, arguing that ‘battle painting is almost as ancient as painting itself ’.8 On the other side of the debate were critics such as Charles Baudelaire who, on the basis of his pacifistic aversion to the army in general, regularly dismissed battle painting as not being art; his arguments culminated in his Salon de 1846, in which he called Horace Vernet ‘the absolute antithesis of an artist’.9 Publications dedicated exclusively to military paintings were, however, rare in the nineteenth century. An anonymous

  5

  6

  7   8

  9

‘Tout cela ira tranquillement prendre sa place dans les docks du musée de Versailles, et personne ne s’en occupera plus. C’est la destine des tableaux de batailles qui sont généralement à l’art de la peinture, ce que les faits divers d’une gazette sont à l’histoire,’ Maxime Du Camp, Le Salon de 1861 (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, A. Bourdilliat et Cie., 1861), 25. Susan L. Siegfried, ‘The Politicization of Art Criticism in the Post-Revolutionary Press’, in Art Criticism and Its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Michael R. Orwicz (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994). On the individual political positions of Second Empire art critics, see La Promenade du critique influent: Anthologie de la critique d’art en France, 1850–1900, eds. Jean-Paul Bouillon et al. (Paris: Hazan, 2010). ‘La peinture de bataille est, du reste, un art particulier et tout moderne,’ Gautier, 1861, 369. ‘La peinture de batailles est presque aussi ancienne que la peinture elle-même,’ Henry Houssaye, ‘La peinture de batailles: Le nouveau tableau de M. Meissonier. – L’Exposition des œuvres de Pils’, Revue des deux mondes 13 (15 February 1876), 864. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1846’, in Critique d’art suivi de Critique musicale, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 130.

3

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Introduction

author devoted a book to L’armée française à l’exposition de peinture de 1861.10 Arsène Alexandre’s 1889 publication Histoire de la peinture militaire en France, which covers the history of French military paintings from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, remains the most detailed study of the genre to this day. In his introduction, Alexandre identified the gap between, on the one hand, the critics’ rejection of the genre as ‘bonne peinture’ and, on the other, its popularity with the masses and importance for the governments.11 Aiming to rescue military paintings from the lowest rung of the genre hierarchy or even to remedy their exclusion from the category of art, Alexandre proclaimed their ability to convey the ‘human drama’.12 A combination of the f leeting topicality of military paintings, their inaccessibility and their disqualification from the twentieth-century modernist-centred canon has resulted in little serious research being conducted on them in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.13 Horace Vernet’s career overlaps with the Second Empire (he died in 1863) and is the conceptual reference point of this study: his œuvre was seminal for the generation of military painters working under the Second Empire. In 1914, Léon Rosenthal’s negative categorisation of Vernet’s œuvre as juste milieu in the publication Du romantisme au réalisme would set the tone for the following decades.14 Since the 1980s there has been a reawakening of interest in military paintings produced after the First Empire, centring on the œuvre of Vernet, to whose works the Académie de France in Rome dedicated a comprehensive retrospective in 1980.15 However, the œuvres of artists 10 11 12 13

14 15

Anonymous, L’armée française à l’exposition de peinture de 1861 (Paris: Henri Plon, 1861). Arsène Alexandre, Histoire de la peinture militaire en France (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1889), 1, 4. ‘le drame humain’, Alexandre, 1889, 6. For example, Robert Rosenblum’s definitive book on nineteenth-century art marginalised figures such as Horace Vernet, despite his curatorial practice, which famously included non-canonical works. See Robert Rosenblum and H. W. Janson, Art of the Nineteenth Century: Painting and Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984). Léon Rosenthal, Du romantisme au réalisme: Essai sur l’évolution de la peinture en France de 1830 à 1848, ed. Michael Marrinan, first published 1914 (Paris: Macula, 1987). Horace Vernet 1789–1863, exh. cat., Académie de France à Rome and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Rome: De Luca, 1980). Claudine Renaudeau lists most of Vernet’s works and gives an overview of his career in Horace Vernet (1789–1863): Chronologie et catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint (PhD thesis, Université de Paris-IV, Paris, 2000). Important twentieth-century studies specialising in aspects of Vernet’s œuvre include Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, ‘Imago Belli: Horace Vernet’s “L’Atelier” as an Image of Radical Militarism under the Restoration’, The Art Bulletin 68, no. 2 ( June 1986), 268–280, Robert N. Beetem, ‘Horace Vernet’s Mural in the Palais Bourbon: Contemporary Imagery, Modern Technology, and Classical Allegory during the July Monarchy’, The Art Bulletin 66 ( June 1984), 254–269, Barbara Sosien, ‘Horace Vernet en Orient’, in L’œil aux aguets ou L’artiste en voyage, ed. François Moureau (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995), and Michael Marrinan, ‘Schauer der Eroberung’, in Bilder der Macht – Macht der Bilder: Zeitgeschichte in Darstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. Stefan Germer and Michael F. Zimmermann (Munich and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997). The most detailed studies of Vernet’s major Algerian works are Marrinan, 1988, Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, 2009, and Hornstein, 2010. Susan Siegfried

Introduction

supported by the Second Empire arts administration, such as Adolphe Yvon, Isidore Pils and Alexandre Protais, continue to be little studied.16 Scholarly attention to war imagery of the Second Empire focuses mainly on (British) paintings of the Crimean War and, especially in recent studies, on the first employment of media such as photographs and prints to represent the Crimean battlefield.17 André Rouillé’s 1997 essay on the inability of photography to capture movement and on war photographers’ struggles and failure to depict the Crimean War is particularly insightful. It forms the basis for my argument that paintings remained the primary conduit for the depiction of war at this historical moment.18 Annie Bardon’s

16

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18

analyses Vernet’s Algerian paintings of the capture of Constantine in Versailles in relation to how their narrative content, in correspondence with larger socioeconomic changes, broke down conventional notions of the grand narrative of history painting and participated in the rise of a realist practice. Her article appeared after the completion of this study. See Susan L. Siegfried, ‘Alternative Narratives’, Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013), 100–127. Other studies on Horace Vernet published after 2013 include Katie Hornstein, ‘Suspended Collectivity: Horace Vernet’s “The Crossing of the Arcole Bridge” (1826)’, Art History 37, no. 3 ( June 2014), 428–453; Katie Hornstein, ‘Horace Vernet’s Capture of the Smalah: Reportage and Actuality in the Early French Illustrated Press’, in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, eds. Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 246–251; Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Horace Vernet’s “Orient”: Photography and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1839, part I: A Daguerrean Excursion’, The Burlington Magazine 158, no. 1357 (April 2016), 264–271; Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Horace Vernet’s “Orient”: Photography and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1839, part II: Toward a Historicized Orient: The Daguerreotypes and Their Texts’, The Burlington Magazine 158, no. 1359 ( June 2016), 430–439; Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, eds. Katie Hornstein and Daniel Harkett (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2017). Recent studies are confined to individual paintings. Stefan Germer analyses Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff (Salon of 1857) in Stefan Germer, ‘Taken on the Spot: Zur Inszenierung des Zeitgenössischen in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Bilder der Macht – Macht der Bilder: Zeitgeschichte in Darstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. Stefan Germer and Michael F. Zimmermann (Munich and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997). Nicole Garnier-Pelle discusses the critical reception of Protais’ Le matin; avant l’attaque and Le soir; après le combat (Salon of 1863) in Nicole Garnier-Pelle, Chantilly: Musée Condé: Peintures des XIXe et XXe siècles (Chantilly: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997). Joan Winifred Martin Hichberger, Images of the Army: The Military in British Art, 1815–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Ulrich Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (New York: Routledge, 2001); Ulrich Keller, ‘Schlachtenbilder, Bilderschlachten – Zur visuellen Kultur des Krimkrieges’, in Der Krimkrieg als erster europäischer Medienkrieg: Kultur und Technik, eds. Georg Maag and Wolfram Pyta, vol. 14 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010). André Rouillé, ‘Ein photographisches Gefecht auf der Krim’, in Bilder der Macht – Macht der Bilder: Zeitgeschichte in Darstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. Stefan Germer and Michael F. Zimmermann (Munich and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997). Hornstein discusses the technical obstacles of photography in the face of military conflict in her chapter ‘Mission Impossible: The Early Aspirations of Military Photography’, Hornstein, 2010, 254–263.

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Introduction

1980 PhD thesis is the only study thus far to offer an extensive treatment of French paintings of the Crimean War.19 Her detailed study presents important factual information about the commissions and travels of the artists and their dual role as war correspondents, and identifies the key motives of the Second Empire arts administration; it provides the empirical foundation for my chapter on the representation of the Crimean War. Her last chapter is dedicated to the dissemination of the paintings through photography and prints. Although only overlapping with the Second Empire by four years, another important reference for this publication is Katie Hornstein’s 2010 thesis on Episodes in Political Illusion: The Proliferation of War Imagery in France (1804–1856).20 Hornstein traces military imagery across different visual media, convincingly demonstrating that it was a dominant cultural narrative in the nineteenth century that existed beyond a fine arts context.21 Her thesis acknowledges the mid-nineteenth-century commercial trend for copyrights of famous military paintings to be more expensive than the paintings themselves. In order to satisfy a mass market, Hornstein contends, artists were often adjusting their pictorial strategies to the paintings’ ultimate purpose to serve as blueprints for prints. In her discussion of the production of Henri DurandBrager’s (1814-1879) paintings of the Crimean battlefield, she argues for the importance of the artist’s additional role as a war reporter and photographer, the new medium of photography being used by artists as a tool for the faithful recording of reality.22 In his 2010 essay on the Crimean War as heralding the rise of modern war reportage and the decline of history painting, Ulrich Keller contends that the visual culture of the Crimean War played an integral part in its historical outcome. This, he argues, was mainly true for Great Britain, where the lack of press censorship meant that news of the high command’s failure in the Crimea was able to stir public opinion and ultimately lead to the downfall of the government.23 * The present study looks at the corpus of military paintings in its entirety and considers the major works shown at the Second Empire Salons from 1852 to 1867, in order to reappraise the paintings themselves and elucidate their dependence on commissioning strategies. This corpus includes representations of the Crimean War and of the Italian 19 20 21

22 23

Annie Bardon, Militärmalerei im Second Empire am Beispiel des Krimkrieges (PhD thesis, Universität Marburg, 1980). Katie Hornstein, ‘Problems of Proliferation in the Visual Culture of the Crimean War’, in Hornstein, 2010, 233–317. Hornstein discusses a wealth of contemporary prints made after Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff in her chapter ‘Adolphe Yvon’s Capture of the Malakoff Tower at the Salon of 1857 and the Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, Hornstein, 2010, 301–316. Hornstein, 2010, 275–292. Keller, 2010.

Introduction

Campaign (1859) as well as the military genre paintings of the 1860s. The paintings have been chosen according to their popular and critical – negative as well as positive – appeal at the time they were on display at the Salons. Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff, for instance, is selected on account of an interest both in how the public responded to its pictorial innovations and in what impact the commissioning motives and political context had on the visual outcome. The book will argue that the paintings’ very raison d’être was exposure at the Salons, where the large formats could exert an immediate inf luence on public opinion about the Second Empire’s politics. Exceptions to this argument are represented by the paintings commissioned for Versailles, for which the formal characteristics will be traced back to the circumstances of painting for a specific viewing context. For the methodology of this publication, studies that employ a social-historical approach have been seminal. Like Albert Boime’s analysis of the Second Empire’s art production, this study combines institutional, formal, artistic and historical perspectives.24 In further linking the paintings of contemporary battles to the militarised state that emerged in the Napoleonic era, this study is indebted to Susan Siegfried’s groundbreaking essay ‘Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in Postrevolutionary France’ (1993).25 The modes of battle painting that Siegfried discerns – the documentary and the affective modes as represented by Lejeune and Gros – are still evident in the Second Empire commissions and thus offer a useful paradigm for my visual analyses. Archival material from the Archives nationales and the Archives des musées nationaux, as well as the document files retained by the museums, provides the basis for the examination of the paintings’ administrative and bureaucratic history. Correspondence between commissioners yields valuable clues about formal aspects of the paintings that have formerly been attributed to artistic decisions. They help to define where artists have taken liberties within a controlled system and where they have followed commissioners’ wishes. An indispensable basis for this approach is Catherine Granger’s L’Empereur et les arts: La liste civile de Napoléon III (2005), which draws together a wealth of primary sources to disprove previous views alleging the passivity of the Second Empire’s arts administration and Napoleon III’s lack of interest in the patronage of the arts.26 The commissioners’ correspondence also provides valuable information about the artists’ travels to the battlefields, their salaries, and the paintings’ formal genesis. Apart from this context of production, most of the topics raised in relation to the paintings are derived from nineteenth-century critical responses. Contemporary 24 25 26

Albert Boime, Art in the Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871, vol. 4, 4 vols., A Social History of Modern Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). Susan L. Siegfried, ‘Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in Postrevolutionary France’, The Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 ( June 1993), 235–258. Catherine Granger, L’Empereur et les arts: La liste civile de Napoléon III (Paris: École des Chartes, 2005).

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8

Introduction

periodicals belonging to different political camps provided a spectrum of opinions about and patterns of collective responses to individual works of art and ultimately provide for the historical contextualisation of the works. The importance that contemporaries attached to historical accuracy in the depiction of war requires an in-depth analysis of the historical details depicted and an evaluation of the extent to which they were, in fact, accurate. Historical details brought to light by the critics’ formal analysis of the paintings are then traced back to the historical context. Roger Price’s thorough analysis of primary material in The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (2001) helped to locate the paintings’ topical functions in their political and social contexts.27 As the public has ‘no voice’, the success of the paintings’ political agendas can often only be gauged with the help of the critics’ reports on how the public reacted, including whether or not crowds gathered in front of the works.28 Additional insights into the mindset of contemporary spectators may be gained from the literature of which they were both reader and subject – that is, from the work of contemporary novelists such as Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert. This approach is justified by the fact that art critics, too, often referenced contemporary literature in their analysis of military paintings.29 This approach provides unexpected insights into, for example, contemporary taboo subjects such as homoeroticism in relation to the army, raised in Flaubert’s Salammbô (1863), which locates this topical subject in the distant past of third-century Carthage.30 The association of historical and literary worlds has been inspired by David Baguley’s effective dissection of Napoleon III’s public image through works by literary figures such as Victor Hugo and Zola in Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (2000).31 The book thus employs ‘culture’ not only as an object of inquiry but also as a documentary source. Probably the most indispensable source for assessing and understanding the audience for whom the military paintings were tailored is Lynn Case’s publication French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (1954, reprinted in 1972), which is based on, among other primary sources, the secret reports to the French government from the procureurs générals and prefects.32 Just as the opinions were f luctuating, the military paintings commissioned pursued different agendas. 27 28

29 30 31 32

Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On the charged term ‘public’ and the increase in public awareness of the arts in eighteenthcentury France, along with the effect that the expression of public opinion had on official institutions and on different styles of painting, see Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985). Houssaye, 15 February 1876, 870. Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863). David Baguley, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Lynn Marshall Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (New York: Octagon Books, 1972).

Introduction

I argue that these agendas were often communicated effectively through the paintings’ entertainment value. As the title of my book suggests, the visions of war sought to be spectacular, catering to the emerging phenomenon of mass spectatorship. My consideration of the phenomenon of crowd-pleasing spectacle in relation to military paintings is indebted to Vanessa Schwartz’s Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (1998), which investigates panoramas, the popular press and early cinema as new constructions of shared visual experiences – and hence values.33 Inspired by Hornstein’s and Bardon’s connection of military paintings with panoramas, my study also takes these ‘low’ art forms as a recurrent theme. My study further engages in a selective comparison of the form and content of military paintings with other genres and artists. In particular, for the notion of the soldier dutifully serving his country as represented in the military paintings of the 1860s, a comparison with contemporary depictions of peasants has brought to light striking parallels and contrasts in form and content. * The conceptual and chronological span of my study is framed by the two Universal Exhibitions that the Second Empire hosted, in 1855 and 1867, which sought to display the full range of the regime’s cultural supremacy. As catalysts of politics and art, these exhibitions lend themselves to an assessment of the state of military painting – abundantly present at both events – near the beginning and towards the end of the Second Empire. Horace Vernet’s 1855 retrospective exhibition, which has not to my knowledge been previously studied, forms the focus of my first chapter, as its visibility made the œuvre of this artist resonate in those of the generation of military painters working under the Second Empire.34 The visual language of historical accuracy or vérité historique was considered to have been ‘invented’ by Vernet and was held as the impetus for the public’s increasing demand for historical truth in painting in the wake of the unprecedented visual press coverage of the Crimean War. This book contends that military paintings should form a larger part of Second Empire historiography. Military paintings, as vehicles of political agendas, formed the point of contact between the government and its electorate. The visual presentation of the military campaigns was an integral part of the regime’s post-war politics and often determined whether the military exploits would remain in the public consciousness. The paintings have to be seen in a context in which the military was more present in daily life than it is today. Footprints of the regime’s militarism are still visible in Paris’ 33 34

Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999). I have re-established the importance of the Universal Exhibition in Vernet’s career in Julia Thoma, ‘Writing History: Vernet’s Œuvre under the Second Empire’, in Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2017).

9

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Introduction

wide boulevards, designed by Baron Haussmann under Napoleon III partly in order to make it easier for the military to crush uprisings. Names of Métro stations such as Solférino and Malakoff, as well as bridges such as the Pont de l’Alma – all names of battles fought during the Crimean War and Italian Campaign – also betray the omnipresence of Second Empire war exploits during the regime and beyond.35 Inaugurated in 1856, the Pont de l’Alma was built at the height of the Parisian obsession with the Armée d’Afrique and the infantry regiment of the zouaves in particular, as the statue of a zouave at the bottom of one of its piers reminds us. The celebration of the figure of the zouave historically connects the official military paintings of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. The regiment formed part of the Armée d’Afrique, which figured prominently in Second Empire military paintings, as they were involved in every military engagement of this period. This army was only twenty years old when Louis-Napoléon declared himself emperor but was already famous for its bravery and effectiveness, the result of hard training and fighting experience in Algeria during the July Monarchy.36 In particular, the zouaves, composed partly of indigenous people from the Zouaoua tribe in French Algeria and partly of Frenchmen, were celebrated for having restored France’s military grandeur and as the successors of Napoleon I’s Grande Armée.37 An officer in one of the cavalry regiments of the Armée d’Afrique and author of military novels glorifying the Second Empire army, Paul de Molènes, wrote in 1860 that ‘the regiments of the zouaves exert a special seduction over the Parisian youth. Their poetic uniforms, their free and daring appearance, their legendary fame […] all this gives them an image of popular chivalry unseen since the days of Napoleon.’38 The frequent comparisons in terms of politics, propaganda and culture between the First and Second Empires, which Napoleon III fostered, are prominently ref lected in the visual rhetoric of Second Empire military paintings. In the present study, formal analyses of the paintings, artists’ own writings and critics’ comments suggest that echoes of First Empire paintings in fact often resonated more directly in the formal character35 36

37 38

Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 480–481. The second Constantine expedition in particular gave rise to a veritable outpouring of popular works, which cemented the Armée d’Afrique’s place in the French collective imagination. See Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 147. On the formation of the zouave regiment, see V. de Mars, ‘Les Zouaves’, Revue des deux mondes 9, no. 2 (March 1855), 1105–1127. Sessions, 2011, 136. ‘Les regiments de zouaves exercent sur la jeunesse parisienne une séduction particulière. Leur poétique uniforme, leurs libres et audacieuses allures, leur célébrité déjà légendaire […] en font de nos jours la plus vive expression de cette chevalerie populaires qui date de Napoléon,’ Paul de Molènes, Les Commentaires d’un soldat. Premiers jours de la guerre de Crimée. L’hiver devant Sébastopol. Derniers jours de la guerre de Crimée. La guerre d’Italie (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1860), 58–59.

Introduction

istics of the paintings than the new visuals of the press. The beginning of the first chapter of this book maps out the rationales of Napoleon III’s imitation of the First Empire, observed by Karl Marx as the basis for this authoritarian state, and their direct inf luence on the art production of the time.39 The concern of Chapter 2, on the commissioners and purchasers of military paintings, is to take into account the inf luence of the arts administration on the style of the paintings and to distinguish that inf luence from the ideals of the Academy. In contrast to the classicism fostered by the Academy, the official taste was predominantly realist, a style Albert Boime coins as ‘official realism’.40 While it has previously been assumed that the style was simply a result of vague eclecticism or classicism, this study is inspired by Boime’s theory, in his words, ‘about a subtle conspiracy organised by the Bonapartist regime to fashion a visual style appropriate to its ideological position’.41 Informed by bourgeois values and positivist, scientific and industrialist attitudes, the style was dismissed by conservative critics such as Étienne Delécluze who noted in 1861 that ‘art […] descends towards reality’.42 The infrastructure of the Second Empire fine arts world allowed government officials to exercise direct inf luence over artistic matters. It thereby became an adversary not only of the Academy but also of the critics, advising artists: ‘Don’t let yourselves be distracted by these banal complaints that repeat themselves incessantly,’ as the ministre d’État Walewski warned at the award ceremony following the Salon of 1861.43 The most drastic intervention by the government was its decision to attach the École des Beaux-Arts to the Maison de l’Empereur in 1863, which meant that it came under the direct inf luence of Napoleon III. As soon as this new structure was in place, the arts administration installed one of its official military painters, Isidore Pils, in the ateliers of the École. The descriptiveness of the official style employed by Pils and his colleagues lent itself to the direct communication of the painted constructions of military invincibility. However, as Chapter 3, on the visual representations of the Crimean War, makes clear, the style suggestive of historical truth for propaganda purposes posed artistic problems in the face of modern warfare. Artists were caught up in a contrast heralded by the Crimean War, as described by Orlando Figes, whose historical account in Crimea: The Last Crusade (2010) is seminal for this chapter:

39 40 41 42 43

Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, first published 1852 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007). Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 577ff. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 577. ‘l’art […] descend vers la réalité’, Étienne-Jean Delécluze, ‘Exposition de 1861 (Deuxième article)’, Journal des débats (8 May 1861). ‘Ne vous laissez pas détourner par ces plaintes banales qui se répètent sans cesse.’ Speech reprinted in Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1863 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1863), xi.

11

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Introduction

It (the Crimean War) was […] the earliest example of a truly modern war – fought with new industrial technologies, modern rifles, steamships and railways, novel forms of logistics and communication like the telegraph, important innovations in military medicine, and war reporters and photographers directly on the scene. Yet at the same time it was the last war to be conducted by the old codes of chivalry, with ‘parliamentaries’ and truces in the fighting to clear the dead and wounded from the killing fields.44 Artists often chose to depict aspects of the military campaign that still followed ‘the old codes’ instead of incorporating modern aspects of warfare into their paintings, as contemporary critics observed as well. Critics such as Lamquet acknowledged the impossibility of depicting modern warfare, often using it as an apologia for the aesthetic failure of the military paintings: The modern tactic, incontestably superior from a military point of view, is of an unequalled poverty when transferred to an artistic work. In fact, the dramatic action exists less than ever, the cannonballs and bullets are fired from a distance, the modern weapons are stiff in shape, the costumes all present the eye with crude and sharply defined colours.45 The paintings themselves stayed surprisingly untouched by these new circumstances, as contemporary critics noted. Baudelaire, for instance, was intrigued by how the age-old dilemma of battle painters – whether to depict an overview of the battle or just a meaningful episode – acquired a new urgency with the Crimean War.46 The tension created by the need to show modern military conf licts that spread out geographically, due to long-range weapons and mass mobilisation, as well as temporally, is resolved in the Salle de Crimée, a propaganda room in Versailles where all major commissions came to hang. Here, paintings showing different aspects of the Crimean War were united to capture the geographical diffusion and temporal extension of the conf lict. In this context, I argue that Yvon’s three Malakoff paintings, formerly only discussed individually, should be seen as a major nineteenth-century project.

44 45

46

Figes, 2010, xix. ‘La tactique moderne, d’une incontestable supériorité au point de vue militaire, est d’une pauvreté sans pareille, si on la fait concourir à une œuvre artistique. En effet, l’action dramatique des combats existe moins que jamais, les boulets et les balles font tout à distance, les armes modernes sont raides de forme, les costumes présentent tous à l’œil des couleurs crues et tranchantes.’ L. Lamquet, ‘Salon de 1861: Les batailles’, Les Beaux-Arts 2, no. 27 (15 May 1861), 291–295, 291. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1859’, in Critique d’art suivi de Critique musicale, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 302.

Introduction

The discrepancy between modern warfare and its rendering in oil becomes even more apparent in my fourth chapter, which is dedicated to the question of why Yvon’s large machines of the Italian Campaign were such a disappointment to critics and, notably, the public alike. The reputations of the paintings remain low to this day, and they have continued to suffer from scholarly neglect. This void perhaps explains why the common argument that the press was the main inf luence on Second Empire military paintings has not been contested. The Italian Campaign of 1859 saw an even greater advance in war technologies, a more effective employment of the railway, and photographers for the first time not refraining from taking shots of corpses. Despite these innovations, Yvon went back to tradition. Mindful of the criticism of previous Salons, he drew on compositional formulae developed by, as he explained in a letter to his commissioners, the early nineteenth-century artist François Gérard for his painting Solférino (Salon of 1861). While Yvon’s solution for staging Napoleon III seemed anachronistic, three years later the crowds and critics were drawn to Ernest Meissonier’s (1815–1891) canvas of the same battle (Salon of 1864). Inserting the high command at the Battle of Solferino in a genre scene, Meissonier seemed to have found a visual language that was free of any art-historical precedents or influence by press images and that broke with Napoleon III’s conventional symbolic programme, giving the emperor a new pictorial identity as a military figure. Painted for the Musée du Luxembourg and a fine-arts context, Meissonier’s pictorial solution remained, however, unique. The paintings of the 1860s treated in Chapter 5 finally move entirely away from an attempt to capture the characteristics of modern warfare. Alexandre Protais’ renderings of the individual soldier’s war-weariness experienced before and after battle hung in all the Salons of the 1860s in the central room and softened the hearts of the public, officials and critics alike. These genre paintings of individual soldiers continue a strand of focusing on soldiers’ sentiments started by Auguste Raffet (1804–1860) and NicolasToussaint Charlet (1792–1845) earlier in the century. With their emphasis on feeling, they are the most unstable images discussed in this book, sometimes eliciting anti-war sentiments in the critics, sometimes, in cases where the paintings had slipped into sentimentalism, ridicule. They demonstrate that the new war technologies and press images had less inf luence on the genre of military painting during the Second Empire than the novels that provided the painters with the inspiration for their subject matter and point of view. Countering the common treatment of the Second Empire as the origin of Modernism or midwife to the incorporation of modern media in art, this study seeks to return to the paintings themselves, including the circumstances of their commissioning and viewing. It contends that the Empire’s military paintings formed a highly visible body of works that ref lected and shaped the contemporary artistic and political landscape and conditioned how war was experienced by the masses. Mass mobilisation, first experienced during the Napoleonic era, and the character of modern conf lict are both

13

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Introduction

ref lected in this artistic genre, which invented itself and evolved during the Second Empire in a climate of economic, social and political change. In order to do justice to the wide-reaching implications and omnipresent existence of military imagery during Napoleon III’s authoritarian regime, the social-historical approach of this study embraces diverse angles such as gendered and visual cultural accounts. Bringing the artworks into dialogue with historical documents, commissioners’ wishes, critical reception and literary culture, this book seeks to highlight the paintings’ spectacular nature as seminal for modern visualisations of war. One of the principal concerns is to recreate the historical, social and art-historical context of the paintings and to consider the explosion of military subjects and new visuals in their own right rather than as a consequence of mere war reportage. The present study traces the evolution and changing connotations of war imagery throughout the Second Empire, culminating in the Universal Exhibition of 1867, which closed this era of official military painting as spectacle.

I Military Paintings in 1855

Historical background: Napoleon III’s politics and the Universal Exhibition of 1855 The Universal Exhibition of 1855 opens today, and the first part of the task you entrusted to us has been accomplished. A Universal Exhibition, which at any time would have been a significant event, becomes unique in history from the circumstances under which this has taken place. France, engaged for the last year in a serious war at eight hundred leagues from her frontiers, is battling gloriously against her enemies. It has been reserved for Your Majesty’s reign to show France worthy of its past in war and greater than ever she was in the arts of peace. The French people are showing the world that, whenever its genius is understood and is well directed, it will always be the great nation.1 (Prince Napoleon, 1855) Resounding in these confident words with which Prince Napoleon, the cousin of the emperor Napoleon  III, opened the Universal Exhibition of 1855 are the dominant, often contradictory, rationales of the Second Empire: the assertion of peace despite the fact that France had provoked war – in this case the Crimean War (1853–1856) – to

1

‘L’Exposition universelle de 1855 s’ouvre aujourd’hui, et la première partie de la tâche que vous nous avez donnée est remplie. Une Exposition universelle, qui en tout temps eût été un fait considérable, devient un fait unique dans l’histoire par les circonstances au milieu desquelles celle-ci se produit. La France, engagée depuis un an dans une guerre sérieuse, à huit cents lieues de ses frontières, lutte avec gloire contre ses ennemis. Il était réservé au règne de Votre Majesté de montrer la France digne de son passé dans la guerre et plus grande qu’elle ne l’a jamais été dans les arts de la paix. Le peuple français fait voir au monde que, toutes les fois que l’on comprendra son génie et qu’il sera bien dirigé, il sera toujours la grande nation.’ Prince Napoleon, opening speech, 15 May 1855, in Prince Napoleon, Rapport sur l’Exposition universelle de 1855 présenté à l’Empereur par S. A. I. le Prince Napoléon, président de la commission (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1857), 399.

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I  Military Paintings in 1855

restore its position of respect and authority abroad; the apparent inf luence of the French people in shaping the nation’s future combined with a reference to the past, namely the First Empire and Napoleon I, the uncle of Napoleon III, as a constant source of glory and legitimation for the Second Empire; finally, and what will interest us most in this chapter, Prince Napoleon’s emphasis on glory being typical of the Second Empire, a notion communicated through an unprecedented culture of spectacle, which dazzled the French public.2 This chapter looks at how the Universal Exhibition of 1855 and the military paintings on display there represented the epitome of the Second Empire’s culture of spectacle. Through an examination of the critical reception of the Horace Vernet retrospective at the Universal Exhibition, we will attempt to reconstruct the political and artistic importance of possibly the most famous painter of military subjects of the nineteenth century. A discussion of his distinctive approach to history sheds light on the status of history painting at this particular historical moment and helps to examine Vernet’s role as the ‘father’ of a whole new generation of military painters working under the Second Empire. Opening on 15 May 1855, the newly built Palais de l’Industrie and the Palais des beaux-arts included twenty-nine participating countries.3 Over the previous two years it had been widely publicised and had entailed elaborate preparations and vast expense. The exhibition was meant to promote peace and replace military rivalry between the nations with competition in science, technology and the arts.4 The intention was not only to rival but also to surpass the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ held in London four years earlier. The 1855 Exhibition also had great symbolic significance for domestic affairs, as the newly formed Second Empire was trying to legitimise itself by referencing the great public spectacles of the First Empire and to forge a connection between the public and the new emperor. A bloody coup d’état staged by the army in 1851 had helped Louis-Napoleon, then President of the Second Republic, to proclaim himself Emperor Napoleon III of the Second Empire in December 1852. The prestige of the name Bonaparte, which had assured the nephew of Napoleon I an overwhelming amount of public support during the political vacuum of the elections of 1848, seemed to legitimise this bold ascent to

2

3

4

For an earlier analysis of gloire, see Valerie Mainz, History, History Painting and Concepts of Gloire in the Life and Work of Jacques-Louis David (PhD thesis, University College London, 1992). On glory as a source of warrior honour in Napoleonic military culture and as attribute of martial masculinity during the First Empire, see Michael J. Hughes, Forging Napoleon’s Grande Armée: Motivation, Military Culture, and Masculinity in the French Army, 1800–1808 (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012). On the organisation, administration and participating artists at the Universal Exhibition, see Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Frank Anderson Trapp, ‘The Universal Exhibition of 1855’, The Burlington Magazine 107, no. 747 ( June 1965), 300.

Historical background: Napoleon III’s politics and the Universal Exhibition of 1855

power without too much public outrage.5 Napoleon  III’s apparently non-militant intentions were instrumental in this, as his subordinates-to-be – shaken by frequent regime changes, economic depression and social fear, and spoiled by a quarter of a century of relative peace – strongly opposed the thought of France going to war.6 With his famous words ‘The Empire means peace’ spoken during a visit to Bordeaux in 1852, Napoleon III sought to assure the French public and all of Europe of his peaceful intentions.7 In his pamphlet Des idées napoléoniennes, published in 1839, the young LouisNapoleon  had already outlined his notions of peace and war, which would remain leitmotifs throughout his reign as emperor.8 They shed light on the apparent contradiction between his declarations of peace and his inauguration of a new era of war with the Crimean War of 1853, followed by the Italian Campaign (1859), the Mexican Campaign (1862–1867), the continued conquest of Algeria (begun in 1830) and several less noted military expeditions to Senegal (1854–1860), South Vietnam (1858–1867), China (1860), and Syria (1860). The axiom of Louis-Napoleon’s Bonapartism, as outlined in this early pamphlet, was that the emperor ought to express the will of the people.9 Furthermore, Louis-Napoleon argued that the notion of peace was characteristic of Bonapartism: largely ignoring Napoleon I’s role as a belligerent leader, he focused on his uncle as a ‘master politician, diplomat and peacemaker’, whose ‘ultimate aim was to bring independence to France’ and ‘to establish European peace’.10 In the era after Napoleon I, the ‘Napoleonic idea’ was not, Louis-Napoleon explained, ‘an idea of war but a social idea – an industrial, commercial, humanitarian idea’. He went on to acknowledge that ‘to some men, it (the Napoleonic idea) always seems to be surrounded by the thunder of combat’ and assured his numerous readers – the pamphlet, according to Roger Price, had sold half a million copies by 1848 – that ‘today the clouds have vanished, and one can see beyond the glory of arms a civil glory which was greater and more lasting’.11

  5

  6   7

  8   9 10 11

Roger Price maintains that the coup d’état was embraced by a wide cross-section of the French population, in The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 33. The seminal study is Lynn Marshall Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (New York: Octagon Books, 1972). Speech in Bordeaux, 19 October 1852, see Discours, messages, et proclamations de S. M. Napoléon III Empereur des français. 1849–1860 (Paris: Mirecourt, Humbert, imprimeur – libraire-éditeur, 1860), 97–98. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Des idées napoléoniennes (Paris: Paulin, 1839). Translated and discussed in David Baguley, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Baguley, 2000, 168–169. Translated and cited in Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16.

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I  Military Paintings in 1855

Fig. 1:  ‘Le prince Louis-Napoléon, Président de la République française’, press image reproduced in: Victor Duruy, Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France, vol. 2 (Paris: Hachette, 1865), 144–145.

Napoleon III was acutely aware of public opinion, which he sought to capture through a refined reporting system.12 This surveillance system set up officials even in the most isolated rural areas who informed him routinely about the public mood. That the emperor often acted on the basis of these f luctuating opinions also accounts for his contradictory politics as he reacted to, rather than instigated, the mood and sought to please opposing political camps. Consequently, the concessions, such as manhood suffrage, made at the beginning of the Second Republic stemmed less from a belief in civic virtues than from his awareness that his main power base was the people of France. That he then gradually curtailed this right by fierce press censorship and bans on certain electors is characteristic of the contradictions that mark both the domestic and foreign policies of the Second Empire. The proclamation ‘The Empire means peace’ was similarly two-faced. Napoleon III noted later that, with these words, he had not meant that he did not intend to go to war.13 Throughout his reign it would become 12

13

Case’s important study of French opinion during the Second Empire is based on the secret reports to the French government from the procureurs générals and the prefects as well as on diplomatic dispatches of the foreign ambassadors and ministers in Paris. See Case, 1972. Memoir addressed to Comte Walewski, 22 January 1859, in Robert Holmes Edleston, Napoléon III. Speeches from the Throne: Together with Proclamations and Some Letters of the Emperor (Cambridge: R. I. Severs, 1931), 161–166; discussed in Price, 2001, 406.

Historical background: Napoleon III’s politics and the Universal Exhibition of 1855

apparent that his main aim was to revise the balance of power agreed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which had sought to isolate France. In order to avoid upsetting the European heads of state who felt still threatened by memories of the bellicose First French Empire, Napoleon III referred in his Bordeaux speech of 1852 only to Algeria: ‘We have opposite Marseille a vast kingdom to assimilate […]. Everywhere we have ruins to restore, false Gods to overthrow, truths to make triumphant.’14 Such contradictory notions as war and peace, progress and tradition, and monarchy and the will of the people were expressed in an allegorical print in Histoire populaire contemporaine (1864– 1866), the official history book of the Second Empire (Fig. 1):15 placed in the centre and on a large scale, the head of Louis-Napoleon is surrounded by several objects; a cannon on the right-hand side evokes warfare, while an artist’s palette stands for art and peace; a statue sitting in a chair on the left-hand side holds a banner that reads Vox populi, but this gesture to public opinion is in contrast to the giant crest over the Napoleonic ‘N’ in the lower centre of the print, which forebodes the authoritarian state – even though the print is still supposed to represent the values of Louis-Napoleon as president of a republic, not as emperor. The most essential feature of Bonapartism was the display of ostensible military greatness or ‘glory’. Numerous festivals, ceremonies, street names and holidays exploited the Bonapartist legend and evoked the military exploits of the First Empire.16 The first of these events under the Second Empire took place in May 1852, when Napoleon III ceremoniously handed over the Imperial Eagle to the army. The Histoire populaire contemporaine noted the meaning of this symbolic act as restoring France’s ‘military honour’ and cited Napoleon III: Soldiers! So take back these eagles, not as a menace against foreigners but as a symbol of our independence, as a souvenir of a heroic era […]. Take back these eagles that so often gained our fathers victory, and vow to die when it is necessary to defend them!17 14

15

16 17

‘Nous avons, en face de Marseille, un vaste royaume à assimiler à la France. […] Nous avons partout enfin des ruines à relever, des faux dieux à abattre, des vérités à faire triompher.’ Discours, messages, et proclamations de S. M. Napoléon III empereur des français. 1849–1860, 1860, 98. The 1864–1866 Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France was an assembly of press articles published earlier, and we can assume that the image of Louis-Napoleon as President of the Second Republic stems from the period between 1849 and 1852. The Almanach de Napoléon published annually at the beginning of the Second Empire contained a calendar with all the commemorative days. See also Price, 2001, 118. ‘Soldats! Reprenez donc ces aigles, non comme une menace contre les étrangers, mais comme le symbole de notre indépendance, comme le souvenir d’une époque héroïque […]. Reprenez ces aigles qui ont si souvent conduit nos pères à la victoire, et jurez de mourir s’il le faut pour les défendre!’ Victor Duruy, Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France, vol. 2 (Paris: Hachette, 1865), 323–324.

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The archbishop celebrating the mass which followed this ceremonial act qualified Napoleon III’s words, noting that ‘peace […] is the aim towards which all human societies march […]. War is only legitimate on the condition of conquering and assuring peace.’18 The whole ceremony, the author of the Histoire populaire noted, ‘immediately brought back the thought of the festivals of Napoleon I’.19 Although the Bonapartist sentiment proved infectious for most of the French population, a few voices warned of the threat of a return to an autocratic regime heralded by the coup d’état. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoléon, first published in German in 1852, Karl Marx famously points out the dangers of history repeating itself. The book’s title refers to the day when Napoleon I became emperor through a coup d’état and is thus a reminder of the fact that Louis-Napoleon, too, had now destroyed a republic. Marx argued that Napoleon III’s restaging of the conventionalised forms and language of the First Empire was a farce: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as great tragedy, the second as mean farce.’20 Indeed, David Baguley suggests calling this stereotyped restaging, in the manner of Barthes, ‘Second Empireness’ or ‘Napoleonicity’.21 The notion of farcical restaging points to an emphasis on appearances that would become characteristic of the Second Empire’s politics. This was expressed by, for example, elaborate and carefully orchestrated public spectacles that created an illusion of military splendour hardly justified by the Empire’s abortive military campaigns. Typically, the handing over of the Imperial Eagle to the army was followed by several days of festivities culminating in a lavish fireworks display, the beginning of which was supposed to represent a battle, and which, according to a Second Empire chronicler, left the Parisian public completely dazzled.22 Indeed, throughout his reign Napoleon III consciously and conspicuously exploited, for political ends, the appetite for entertainment characteristic of the rising mass consumer culture of the bourgeoisie. In her analysis

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‘La paix […] est le but vers lequel marchent les sociétés humaines […]. La guerre n’est légitime qu’à la condition de conquérir et d’assurer la paix.’ Cited in Duruy, 1865, vol. 2, 324. ‘rapporta tout de suite la pensée aux fêtes de Napoléon Ier’, Duruy, 1865, vol. 2, 323. ‘Hegel bemerkt irgendwo, daß alle großen weltgeschichtlichen Thatsachen und Personen sich so zu sagen zweimal ereignen. Er hat vergessen hinzuzufügen: das eine Mal als große Tragödie, das andre Mal als lumpige Farce.’ Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, first published 1852 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 9. Marx added that Napoleon  III replaced the republican slogan ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ with ‘Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery’ and characterised the historical period between 1848 and 1851 as a satirical play. See Marx, 2007, 53. Baguley, 2000, 158, referring to Roland Barthes, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’, Poétique 49, no. 49 (1982), 13–21. Duruy, 1865, vol. 2, 327.

Historical background: Napoleon III’s politics and the Universal Exhibition of 1855

of nineteenth-century consumer culture, Vanessa Schwartz argues that mid-century Paris saw the rise of a new urban crowd whom she calls a society of spectators and who were fascinated by visual displays.23 According to Baguley, it was this fascination of the public with spectacle in general that Napoleon III’s populist politics sought to exploit.24 The ultimate spectacles were the Universal Exhibitions, of which the Second Empire hosted two, one in 1855 and one in 1867. The unprecedented size of the 1855 Exhibition, housed in huge exhibition halls, was intended to impress and entertain its visitors and served to ‘enhance a prevailing sense of easy optimism among an increasingly powerful bourgeoisie’ while the unpopular Crimean War was simultaneously being waged elsewhere.25 Under the banner of peace, the exhibition allowed open competition with other countries while seeking to display, as Baguley notes, ‘power, authority, legitimacy, prosperity, perpetuity, centrality, and perfection’.26 For the 1855 Exhibition, the French Imperial Commission claimed to have fulfilled the notion of universalism suggested by the name Exposition universelle by adding fine arts to the display of science and technology. This measure sought to affirm the prestige of French culture and exceed London’s ‘Great Exhibition’ in its totality. It also meant that fine arts, too, had now been given the specific task of glorifying the French Second Empire. Paintings were viewed in a different context from the annual Salons and consequently analysed along different lines. On the one hand, the international scope of the exhibition allowed an unparalleled comparison between French and foreign contemporary art. And on the other, the unprecedented idea of devoting a retrospective to four French artists – Vernet, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix and Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps – who all represented different artistic directions created a direct debate within the ‘French School’, even leading many critics to the conclusion that no such school still existed.27 The concept of showing retrospectives was considerably different from the annual Salon because it did not involve the display of ‘the latest developments’ but instead enabled a critical evaluation of an individual artist’s whole career.28 The Imperial Commission’s decision to grant Vernet a retrospective meant that a military painter took centre stage. While Delacroix and Decamps were invited to display their past œuvre in the general exhibition halls of the French fine arts section, Vernet and Ingres were the only artists to be granted a single exhibition space for their

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Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999), 1–12. Baguley, 2000, 189. Trapp, June 1965, 300. Baguley, 2000, 194. See for example Claudius Lavergne, Exposition universelle de 1855. Beaux-arts. Compte-rendu extrait du journal l’Univers (Paris: Imprimerie Bailly, Divry et Cie., 1855), 70. Mainardi, 1987, 46.

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Fig. 2:  ‘Exposition Universelle de 1855’, Magasin Pittoresque 23 ( July 1855), 215.

retrospectives. Their two rooms stood out, as they f lanked the central room of French art symmetrically and were thus separated from the rest of the French display (Fig. 2). In their rooms, Ingres and Vernet seem to have had a free rein and could show as many paintings as they liked.29 Ingres showed forty-three works, while Vernet was represented by twenty-two.30 The state-organised Imperial Commission, led by Napoleon III’s cousin, obviously did not select the artists according to their conformity to academic principles as had been done in the past. Instead, the Commission sought to communicate France’s cultural superiority by showing its variety of styles under the banner of eclecticism. Vernet and Ingres had in common only the fact that they were the most internationally famous whereas their œuvres belonged to fundamentally different artistic camps, as I will discuss further in due course.31 In the context of the

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As little correspondence about Vernet’s exhibition preparation survives, we can only assume that the government granted him similar conditions to those afforded to Ingres. On Ingres’ freedom of decision, see Mainardi, 1987, 42, 51, and Andrew Carrington Shelton, Ingres and His Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 215. Maxime Du Camp let his readers know that both Ingres and Vernet could decide over the installation as they wished. See Maxime Du Camp, Les beaux-arts à l’exposition universelle de 1855. Peinture – Sculpture (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1855), 39. The enormous dimensions of Vernet’s paintings might explain why he filled his gallery with fewer paintings than did Ingres. For a detailed analysis of the preparation, selection, presentation and critical feedback of Ingres’ retrospective at the 1855 Exposition universelle, see Shelton, 2005, 214–238.

Vernet’s career as illustrated by the retrospective of 1855

Universal Exhibition, art became associated with national pride and was therefore represented by Ingres’ œuvre as the epitome of ‘high’ art and, even more directly, incarnated in Vernet’s works commemorating recent French military glories. By 1855, Horace Vernet could already look back on a successful artistic career spanning four decades. During this time, he had been one of the most inf luential figures in the art world – first as an oppositional artist during the Restoration and eventually as the official military painter of Louis-Philippe.32 As his œuvre was still being associated with the July Monarchy at the dawn of the Second Empire, Vernet found himself at an ambiguous point of his career in 1855.33 Viewed in this light, the government’s proposal to stage his œuvre at the Universal Exhibition in 1855 provided a unique chance to shape his legacy as one of the greatest battle painters of the century. The critical feedback of 1855 suggests that Vernet succeeded, as it was generally agreed that he had been the innovator of a whole genre. Military painting, noted Léon Lagrange in 1861, would never be the same again after Vernet’s introduction of ‘military realism’.34 How this new visual language was employed under three successive governments, how it broke with the conventions of history painting, and the ways in which it functioned as popular entertainment will form the main interest of the following analysis of the artist’s retrospective exhibition in 1855.

Vernet’s career as illustrated by the retrospective of 1855 The selection of twenty-two works for the retrospective covered the whole spectrum of Vernet’s variations of style, genres, formats and subject matter and gives an insight into the political content of his œuvre.35 In particular, Vernet’s military paintings included at the Universal Exhibition were inevitably interlinked with nineteenth-century French politics.36 Henri Delaborde noted in the year of Vernet’s death in 1863 that

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Katie Hornstein has pointed out in a recent study that Vernet worked for the Bourbon family as early as in 1822, convincingly arguing that the artist’s persona as a rebel was in fact ambiguous. Katie Hornstein, ‘Suspended Collectivity: Horace Vernet’s “The Crossing of the Arcole Bridge” (1826)’, Art History 37, no. 3 ( June 2014), 430. The sixty-three-year-old Vernet admitted in a letter to his son-in-law, Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), that he might have to ‘close the shop’ (fermer la boutique), Vernet to Delaroche, letter of 15 April 1852, cited in Amédée Durande, Joseph, Carle et Horace Vernet: Correspondance et biographies (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1864), 307. ‘réalisme militaire’, Léon Lagrange, ‘Le Salon de 1861 (3e article)’, Gazette des beaux-arts 10 (15 June 1861), 322. Apart from the military subjects, this included paintings stemming from Vernet’s Romantic period of the 1820s, his Old Testament subjects of the 1830s, portraits and several hunting scenes. For a more detailed analysis of Vernet’s preparation and decisions for selection for his retrospective at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 as well as a comparison to Ingres’ 1855 exhibition space, see Julia Thoma, ‘Writing History: Vernet’s Œuvre under the Second Empire’,

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‘perhaps rather than as a painter, (Vernet) was honoured as the defender of the national cause, the advocate of misfortune, the avenger of our forgotten or half-known glories’.37 Vernet chose the works himself and the selection therefore ref lects how he wanted to be perceived in 1855. Most of the works had been painted under previous regimes and provide insights into how Vernet positioned himself politically through his paintings during the frequent regime changes of the first half of the nineteenth century.38 In 1855, the painting Intérieur d’atelier 39 of 1821 functioned as a reminder of the young Vernet’s sympathies with the liberal movement, which opposed the Bourbon Restoration government (1814–1830) in the 1820s (Fig. 3). As Nina AthanassoglouKallmyer has established, the painting shows the liberal political grouping that regularly gathered in Vernet’s studio at the time, and includes portraits of known Bonapartists, Orleanists and Republicans who were united in their opposition to the ruling Bourbons.40 The martial aspect that was so important for the Liberals’ promotion of the idea of a strong France after the humiliating defeat of Napoleon I in 1815 is embodied in the fencing scene in which we see Vernet from the back.41 The Liberals’ patriotic claims were in line with the popular cult of Napoleon and glorification of the First Empire, now topical again in 1855. Vernet had glorified Napoleonic times not only in his paintings but also in lithographs, which Delaborde in 1863 referred to as ‘means of political propaganda’.42 As Lagrange observed, also writing in the year of Vernet’s death, the lithographs ‘f looded Paris’ under the Restoration and contributed crucially to the popular nostal-

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in Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2017). ‘On honorait encore en lui (Vernet), et peut-être au fond de préférence au peintre, le défenseur de la cause nationale, l’avocat du malheur, le vengeur de nos gloires oubliées ou méconnues.’ Henri Delaborde, ‘Horace Vernet. Ses œuvres et sa manière’, Revue des deux mondes 44 (March 1863), 85. Vernet listed all the works in a letter to Nieuwerkerke, 20 March 1855, Archives des musées nationaux P30; and Claudine Renaudeau, Horace Vernet (1789–1863): Chronologie et catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint (PhD thesis, Université de Paris-IV, Paris, 2000), 87. Throughout the book, the titles of the paintings correspond to the ones used at the exhibition discussed. Intérieur d’atelier was the title listed in the 1855 Salon catalogue. The second time a painting is mentioned, I will often use a short title. Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, ‘Imago Belli: Horace Vernet’s “L’Atelier” as an Image of Radical Militarism under the Restoration’, The Art Bulletin 68, no. 2 ( June 1986), 272. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, June 1986, 268. ‘un moyen de propagande politique’, Delaborde, March 1863, 85. On Vernet’s lithographic practice, see Germain Hediard, ‘Les maîtres de la lithographie: Horace Vernet’, L’Artiste 5 ( June 1893), 429–437; Germain Hediard, ‘Les maîtres de la lithographie: Horace Vernet (fin)’, L’Artiste 6 (August 1893), 89–98. On Vernet as printmaker in general, see Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Yale University Press, 2001); and Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints and the Visual Economy in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Yale University Press, 2013).

Vernet’s career as illustrated by the retrospective of 1855

Fig. 3:  Horace Vernet, Intérieur d’atelier, 1820–1821, oil on canvas, 55 × 66 cm, Collection Carnot, Fondation Carnot, Neuilly-sur-Seine.

gia for the First Empire.43 Delaborde noted in 1863: ‘One passed these prints, after some paintings which had not appeared at the Salon and which represented Napoleon on the Island of Elba or on Saint Helena, from hand to hand (and) framed them piously.’44 They were often compared to the work of Vernet’s friend Pierre-Jean Béranger, portrayed in Intérieur d’atelier, who wrote songs glorifying Napoleonic times. In 1824, his friend Auguste Jal asserted that ‘everyone owns a lithograph by Horace Vernet, just as one has a song by Béranger’.45 That Vernet was aware of the importance

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Léon Lagrange, ‘Artistes contemporains: Horace Vernet (premier article)’, Gazette des beauxarts 15 (1 October 1863), 306. ‘On se passait de main en main […], on encadrait pieusement ces estampes d’après quelques tableaux qui n’avaient pas figuré au Salon, et qui représentaient Napoléon à l’Ile de Elbe ou à Sainte-Hélène,’ Delaborde, March 1863, 85. ‘Tout le monde possède une lithographie d’Horace Vernet, comme on a une chanson de Béranger.’ Auguste Jal, L’artiste et le philosophe. Entretiens critiques sur le Salon de 1824 (Paris: Ponthieu, 1824), 103.

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Fig. 4:  Horace Vernet, La Barrière de Clichy, ou la défense de Paris en 1814, 1820, oil on canvas, 95.5 × 130.5 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

of the printed medium in the circulation of his art is suggested in his list of March 1855 with the works to be exhibited, where he included eight engravings of the paintings on display; however, they do not appear in the final Salon catalogue and do not ultimately seem to have been exhibited.46 Also absent were the historic battles that Vernet had painted for Versailles. Striking omissions were works from Vernet’s early career, such as the painting of the medieval Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, which marked a milestone in his career as one of his first public successes at the Salon of 1817. Most notably, there was no trace of Vernet’s work for the Bourbon royal family. These omissions of historic battles and Bourbon subject matter coupled with the inclusions of paintings of Napoleonic and other more recent conf licts, point to Napoleonic subject matter as a main selection criterion in addition to the works’ fame. Indeed, two more paintings included in the 1855 retrospective betrayed Vernet’s use of art to communicate liberal ideas at the beginning of his career. Both La barrière 46

Vernet to Nieuwerkerke, 20 March 1855, Archives des musées nationaux P30; and Renaudeau, 2000, 84.

Vernet’s career as illustrated by the retrospective of 1855

Fig. 5:  Horace Vernet, Jemmapes, 1821, oil on canvas, 177.2 × 288.3 cm, The National Gallery, London.

de Clichy, ou la défense de Paris en 1814 (1820; Fig. 4) and Jemmapes: Général Dumouriez, 1792 (1821; Fig. 5) were rejected by the Restoration Salon jury of 1822 on account of their Napoleonic connotations.47 The former painting illustrates the defence of Napoleonic Paris against the pro-Bourbon allies in March 1814 – Vernet’s only active military experience and a decisive inf luence on his œuvre.48 In the painting the artist portrayed himself as a member of the National Guard. Also depicted are Marshal Moncey, who had fought during the Napoleonic Wars in the National Guard, other famous figures of the Revolutionary army and Vernet’s liberal friends, among them Nicolas Charlet, the famous lithographer and painter whose work was often compared to Vernet’s.49 As 47 48

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Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, L’état et les artistes: De la restauration à la monarchie de Juillet (1815–1833) (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 103. For an account of Vernet’s participation in the defence, see Lagrange, 1 October 1863, 302. Beulé noted that ‘the events of 1814 and 1815 had a decisive influence on Horace Vernet’s ideas’ (Les évènements de 1814 et de 1815 eurent une influence décisive sur les idées d’Horace Vernet) Charles-Ernest Beulé, Éloge de M. Horace Vernet (Paris: Institut impérial de France, 1863), 5. Delaborde, March 1863, 85. On the figures depicted and the reception of Barrière de Clichy, see Horace Vernet 1789–1863, exh. cat., Académie de France à Rome and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Rome: De Luca, 1980), 58–59. On Charlet’s lithographic practice, see Susannah Lucy Walker, Order and Pleasure in the Lithographic Work of NicolasToussaint Charlet (1792–1845) (PhD thesis, University College London, 2012). On contemporary comparisons of Vernet’s with Charlet’s lithographic œuvre, see Bann, 2001, 79; Bann, 2013, 127.

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Marie-Claude Chaudonneret points out, it is not entirely obvious why Barrière de Clichy should have been understood as oppositional, as Marshal Moncey and Horace Vernet, among other combatants, eventually defected to Louis XVIII.50 However, contemporaries such as Vernet’s liberal friends Étienne de Jouy and Antoine Jay understood the painting to be critical of the Bourbon Restoration, standing for the last struggle of the great military epoch of the Empire.51 Jemmapes had been rejected by the Salon jury in 1822 not only for its subject matter – fought in Belgium in 1792, it was the first battle after the proclamation of the Republic – but also because its commissioner, the Duc d’Orléans, was an opponent of the Bourbon regime. It was one of the four battle paintings that the Duc d’Orléans had commissioned.52 He is depicted in Jemmapes as well as in Valmy: Général Kellermann, 1792 (1826), which depicts the Valmy battle fought by the French Revolutionary Army against the invading Austro-Prussian force in 1792.53 The other two paintings, Hanau: L’empereur Napoléon Ier, 1813 (1824) and Montmirail: L’empereur Napoléon Ier, 1814 (1822), depict battles of the Campaign of Leipzig.54 All four paintings were on display in 1855, although Vernet had to restore them before being able to include them in the retrospective, as they had been damaged by fire at the Palais Royal during the Revolution of 1848.55 This suggests that Vernet attached special importance to the Napoleonic affiliations these paintings commemorated. Although only Jemmapes and Clichy had been rejected in 1822, Vernet decided to withdraw all of the paintings submitted and instead to organise a solo exhibition of his previous œuvre at his studio that year.56 The exhibition was, as Mantz put it, equivalent to an ‘accession to the throne’ because the famous artist’s rejection at the Salon drew public attention, stirred by a pamphlet by Jouy and Jay.57 Now not even the king, Charles X, could ignore the artist’s extraordinary popularity with the public, and he started to commission paintings from him, steadily eroding Vernet’s reputation as a 50 51 52 53 54

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Chaudonneret, 1999, 103. Chaudonneret, 1999, 103. On the commission, production and reception of the four paintings, see Horace Vernet 1789– 1863, exh. cat., 1980, 62–64. Horace Vernet, Valmy: Général Kellermann, 1792, 1826, oil on canvas, 174.6 × 287 cm, The National Gallery, London. Horace Vernet, Hanau: L’empereur Napoléon Ier, 1813, 1824, oil on canvas, 174 × 289.8 cm, The National Gallery, London; Horace Vernet, Montmirail: L’empereur Napoléon Ier, 1814, 1822, oil on canvas, 178.4 × 290.2 cm, The National Gallery, London. Letter from Lord Hertford, who had bought the paintings at the sale of Louis-Philippe’s collection in 1851, to Vernet on 8 April 1855, Horace Vernet dossier, National Gallery Library, London. Vernet withdrew all but one painting: Joseph Vernet, attaché à un mât, 1822, oil on canvas, 275 × 336 cm, Musée Calvet, Avignon. See Chaudonneret, 1999, 103. ‘un avènement’, Paul Mantz, ‘Horace Vernet’, L’Artiste 2, no. 12 (22 November 1857), 179; Antoine Jay and Étienne de Jouy, Salon d’Horace Vernet. Analyse historique et pittoresque des quarante-cinq tableaux exposés chez lui en 1822 (Paris: Ponthieu, 1822).

Vernet’s career as illustrated by the retrospective of 1855

rebel. At the Salon of 1824, as Marie-Claude Chaudonneret points out, Vernet had a kind of revival of his solo exhibition as probably more than twenty of his paintings were shown, including the two formerly rejected works.58 Vernet’s inclusion of the two almost identical paintings Mazeppa (1825) and Mazeppa aux loups (1826) in the retrospective of 1855 likewise betrays the artist’s experiments with styles and subjects – the vivid brushstrokes and colour palette as well as the subject matter, a poem by Lord Byron, assign the paintings to the Romantic movement.59 The paintings were also political, for supporting Romanticism, as Beth Wright has established, was understood as ‘an attack on Bourbon institutions that supported classicism’.60 The following years brought Vernet honorary titles, his appointments as professor at the École des Beaux-Arts (1826) and as director of the French Academy in Rome (1829), an accolade that, significantly, he received before Ingres.61 The Fine Arts Quarterly Review suspected that Charles X had only appointed Vernet as director in order to rid himself of the ‘oppositional’ artist.62 Nevertheless, in his capacity as director, Vernet continued to promote himself as a liberal thinker and asked the Academy in Paris to give the students more freedom from the principles of what had become the Davidian school; his differences with the Academy in Paris, which oversaw the posts in Rome, culminated in Vernet offering his resignation, which the minister of the interior, François Guizot, declined to accept.63 Even the progressive Mantz wrote that Vernet had neglected his responsibilities because he had failed to teach his students ‘the mysterious world of beauty’ of ancient and Renaissance art.64 However, Delaborde was later to affirm that

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However, this exhibition of Vernet’s Revolutionary and Napoleonic battle scenes was allowed by the Bourbon government only under highly controlled circumstances. Only one painting was shown at a time. See Chaudonneret, 1999, 105–108. Horace Vernet, Mazeppa, 1825, oil on canvas, 100 × 138 cm, Musée Calvet, Avignon; Horace Vernet, Mazeppa aux loupes, 1826, oil on canvas, 100 × 138 cm, Musée Calvet, Avignon. Vernet had damaged the first version, destined for the Musée Calvet in Avignon, while fencing but restored it so flawlessly that he sold the second version to a private collector. The Musée Calvet bought it from the private collector during Vernet’s lifetime. See Horace Vernet 1789–1863, exh. cat., 1980, 74. Beth S. Wright, Painting and History during the French Restoration: Abandoned by the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 28. On Vernet’s impact on the pensioners in Rome as director at the Villa Medici, see Kathy Anne McLauchlan, French Artists in Rome, 1815–1863 (PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2001), 135–142. Anonymous, ‘Horace Vernet: His Life and Works’, Fine Arts Quarterly Review (1864), 143. McLauchlan, 2001, 135. For more on the dispute, see also Correspondance des directeurs de l’Académie de France à Rome. Vernet 1829–1834, eds. François Fossier, Isabelle Chave, and Jacques Kuhnmunch, vol. 5 (Paris: Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2010). ‘le monde mystérieux de la beauté’, Mantz, 22 November 1857, 179.

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Vernet’s rebellion had not compromised ‘the credit of official representatives of […] the regime’.65 With the accession to the throne in 1830 of Vernet’s principal patron, the Duc d’Orléans as King Louis-Philippe, Vernet’s art became official and ultimately lost its rebellious potential. As Mirecourt explained in 1857: ‘The author of the Battle of Jemmapes had necessarily to become the favourite painter of the new court.’66 Indeed, Jemmapes was now shown at the Salon of 1831, while Clichy entered the Musée du Luxembourg in 1835, as the new king sought to ally himself with the liberal sentiments of the population and evoke his republican past.67 Vernet’s main occupation under the July Monarchy was his involvement in the king’s project of the Musée de l’Histoire de France in Versailles (renamed Musée Impérial during the Second Empire), built to commemorate ‘all the glories of France’ and inaugurated in 1837.68 Vernet was responsible for both the pictorial and decorative programme of the Salles d’Afrique, the three rooms that were dedicated to recent milestones of the conquest of Algeria; this included the Salle de Constantine, the Salle de la Smala and the Salle du Maroc (left unfinished when Louis-Philippe abdicated in 1848).69 At the Universal Exhibition, two of Vernet’s paintings on display stemmed from this project. Bataille d’Isly: Le maréchal Bugeaud août 1814 (Salon of 1846) was originally commissioned for the unfinished Salle de Maroc;70 the second painting was, astonishingly, La Smala: Duc d’Aumale, 16 mai 1843 (Salon of 1845; Pl. 1), twenty-one by almost five metres large, which depicts the French taking of the itinerant capital of Abd-elKader, the leader of the resistance to French colonial rule. This enormous painting enjoyed extraordinary popularity with the crowds at the Salon of 1845 and usually formed the centrepiece of the Salle de la Smala in Versailles but was now on view at the 65 66 67 68 69

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‘compromit nullement le crédit auprès des représentants officiels du nouveau régime’, Delaborde, March 1863, 86. ‘Nécessairement l’auteur de la Bataille de Jemmapes devait être le peintre favori de la nouvelle cour.’ Eugène de Mirecourt, Horace Vernet (Paris: Gustave Havard, 1858), 47. Judith et Holopherne (Salon of 1831), exhibited in 1855, also entered the Musée du Luxembourg, see Chaudonneret, 1999, 34. The museum represented French history in a general Galerie des batailles, a Crusades section, a section about the Empire and the Salles d’Afrique. For the commission history, art-historical context, iconography and political implications of the Salles d’Afrique, see Melanie Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful: Representing the Conquest of Algeria, 1830–1848 (PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2009), 94–102. For a discussion of the narrative strategy in the Siege of Constantine paintings, see furthermore Michael Marrinan, ‘Schauer der Eroberung’, in Bilder der Macht – Macht der Bilder: Zeitgeschichte in Darstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. Stefan Germer and Michael F. Zimmermann (Munich and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997), 270–284; and Katie Hornstein, Episodes in Political Illusion: The Proliferation of War Imagery in France (1804–1856) (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2010), 205–220. Horace Vernet, Bataille d’Isly: Le maréchal Bugeaud août 1814, 1846, oil on canvas, 514 ×  1040 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Vernet’s career as illustrated by the retrospective of 1855

Fig. 6:  Horace Vernet, Campagne de Kabylie: Gouverneur-général Randon, 1853, 1854, oil on canvas, 194 × 123 cm, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne.

Palais des beaux-arts. As the 1855 Salon catalogue indicated, Attaque de la porte de Constantine: Lieutenant-colonel Lamorcière, 13 octobre 1837 was an 1855 copy of one of the works that Vernet painted of the Siege of Constantine in 1837, but it does not seem that this was one of the works commissioned for Versailles.71 In 1855, these three Algerian battle paintings stood for the phase in Vernet’s œuvre which announced his seemingly documentary and detailed way of depiction, developed as a response to Louis-Philippe’s demand for authentication of the success of his military campaigns. 71

Horace Vernet, Attaque de la porte de Constantine: Lieutenant-colonel Lamorcière, 13 octobre 1837, before 1840, engraving by Jazet, 103.5 × 87.2 cm (with frame), Musée Rolin, Autun (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

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The four works by Vernet painted under the Second Empire and included in the retrospective – two hunting scenes, a portrait of General Vaillant and a new episode of the Algerian Campaign – were not given much attention by the critics, who were more interested in seeing the milestones of Vernet’s career. Vernet, however, attached special importance to the latter painting, Campagne de Kabylie: Gouverneur-général Randon, 1853 (Fig. 6), which depicts the celebrating of the anniversary of the French landing in Algeria with a mass in Kabylia, in which the artist had participated.72 Painted as late as 1854, it can be seen as a summary of the artist’s career to date: military, Orientalist and religious subject matter meet, rendered in a realistic style with emphasis on the anecdotal.73 As a celebration of the French conquest, the work is again highly topical, especially in 1855 when Napoleon III took over the Algerian enterprise from his predecessor. When Eugène Loudun tried to identify what Vernet was meant to stand for at the Universal Exhibition of 1855, he noted that he was referred to as ‘the painter of the July Monarchy, of a certain epoch’.74 Loudun’s dismissive statement will be countered in the next section of this chapter where a close reading of the formal innovations in Vernet’s 1845 painting La Smala will suggest that Vernet’s œuvre was in fact a seminal inf luence beyond the July Monarchy. Politically, as we have seen, Vernet’s art, with its early Napoleonic connotations, was versatile in the context of nineteenth-century nostalgia for the First Empire, and his biographer Amédée Durande was correct when he wrote: ‘Horace Vernet had to be the painter of the new Empire as he had been the one of the first.’75 The following section will focus on the critical response to Vernet’s iconic La Smala to show how the painter broke with established norms for history painting to introduce the entertaining devices of the ‘low’ art form of panoramas to military paintings. He thereby found a new visual language that appealed to the rising consumer culture and became ground-breaking for the generation of military painters working under the Second Empire.

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The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse. European Painters in North Africa and the Near East, ed. Mary Anne Stevens, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (London, 1984), 231. On the dual notions of militarism and spirituality in Messe en Kabylie, see De Delacroix à Renoir: L’Algérie des Peintres, exh. cat., Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2003), 165–166. ‘M. H. Vernet est […] appelé le peintre de la monarchie de juillet, d’une certaine époque’, Eugène Loudun, Le Salon de 1855 (Paris: Ledoyen, 1855), 124. ‘Horace Vernet devait être le peintre du nouvel Empire comme il avait été celui du premier.’ Durande, 1864, 307.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question The presence of La Smala in 1855 invited critics to revisit the observations made at earlier Salons of Vernet’s approach to the central artistic dilemma of his age: how to paint history. Traditionalists felt that it represented a decline from the highest genre of history painting to simple journalism.76 Showing a recent battle, the painting continued a tradition established in the early nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s state commissions encouraged paintings of recent military events that soon appeared in large numbers at the Salons.77 While, around 1800, current events were still thought unsuitable for fine arts, by 1855 battle painting had come to be considered the only possible form of the genre of history painting by art critics like the Goncourt brothers.78 The critical reception of 1855 raises the key issues of Vernet’s battle paintings and locates his break with genre hierarchy, composition and thematic selection. At the same time it points to Vernet’s innovations in regard to working methods, the relationship of his paintings with their viewers, the function of the paintings as historical documentation, and Vernet’s approach to history itself, which would be seminal for the next generation of military painters working under the Second Empire. In Vernet’s œuvre, one can still find traces of the pictorial rhetoric established by the First Empire artists Louis François Lejeune (1775–1848) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), who were the first artists to commemorate recent military conf licts in the nineteenth century.79 Lejeune’s La Bataille de Marengo, 14 juin 1800 (Fig. 7) and Gros’ Combat de Nazareth (Fig. 8), both exhibited at the Salon of 1801, represented two different modes of painting battles, which Susan Siegfried has categorised as the ‘affective’ and the ‘documentary’ modes.80 Gros’ ‘affective’ mode – the chaos of battle that plunges the viewer right into the action – would attract celebrated followers such as Girodet, Géricault and Delacroix.81 As we shall see, Vernet’s paintings, however, while borrowing some aspects of Gros’ pictorial rhetoric, such as the centres of action, largely followed the ‘documentary’ mode of Lejeune in its apparent objectivity. Indeed, Siegfried has asserted that Lejeune’s ‘documentary’ mode influenced artists throughout the nineteenth 76

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The decline of the category of history painting has been the subject of a wealth of scholarship, including Wright, 1997. A seminal essay on this subject is Paul Duro, ‘Giving up on History? Challenges to the Hierarchy of the Genres in Early Nineteenth-Century France’, Art History 28, no. 5 (special issue: about Stephen Bann) (November 2005), 689–711. Susan L. Siegfried, ‘Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in Postrevolutionary France’, The Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 ( June 1993), 235. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, La Peinture à l’Exposition universelle de 1855 (Paris, 1855), 16–17. Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Louis David, son école et son temps: Souvenirs (Paris: Didier, 1855), 385. Siegfried, June 1993, 236. Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Les Beaux-arts dans les deux mondes en 1855 (Paris: Charpentier, Libraire-éditeur, 1856), 381–382; Siegfried, June 1993, 257.

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Fig. 7:  Louis François Lejeune, La Bataille de Marengo, 14 juin 1800, 1801, oil on canvas, 180 × 250 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

century and names Horace Vernet’s juste-milieu œuvre as an example.82 With the similar aim of seducing a public thirsty for entertainment, Vernet’s visualisations of recent battles broke with established norms for history painting as they took Lejeune’s mode to another level – in regard to both the suggestion of ‘reality’ and the ambition to entertain the Parisian masses. The ‘documentary’ mode finds a literal expression in La Smala (Pl. 1), where the historical narrative takes up the entire length of the canvas. The painting’s subject is the capture of Abd-el-Kader, the leader of the African resistance against the French, and his itinerant capital made up of tents, called Smala in Arabic, on 16 May 1843. Led by King Louis-Philippe’s son, the Duc d’Aumale, this attack was celebrated in France as a decisive step towards absolute French military rule in Algeria. The horizon, limited by a sandy mountain chain, runs horizontally along the central axis of the canvas height, thereby constructing a slightly hovering viewpoint on the action in the foreground. The unfolding narrative is bundled in several scenes that on the left side illustrate the orderly French attack by the well-groomed Chasseurs d’Afrique in white and red trousers and blue tunics, mounted on strong horses. Their puffs of white gun smoke 82

Siegfried, June 1993, 257.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

Fig. 8:  Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Combat de Nazareth, 1801, oil on canvas, 135 × 195 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.

are echoed by swirls of stirred sand. The right side is taken up by scenes suggesting Algerian panic and chaos: striped tents are collapsing, exotic cattle are f leeing in all directions, families are dispersed, some Algerians raise their weapons in vain, and household items are scattered in the foreground. Including ethnographic details and Oriental objects, La Smala catered to the French audience’s interest in exoticism.83 There are strange objects, such as carriages with long poles balancing on the camels’ backs, while, in a similarly lurid vein, the sensual curves of the Algerian women on the right are exposed as their clothes slip off during the tumult. The painting displays direct formal pictorial citations of First Empire battle painting. As Vandenbrouck has noted, the pose of the Duc d’Aumale, mounted on a white horse just left of the canvas centre, directly references that of Napoleon in Gros’ famous Napoléon Ier sur le champ de bataille d’Eylau (Salon of 1808).84 Both figures stretch 83

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For an Orientalist reading of La Smala, see Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, 2009, 122–125; and Melanie Vandenbrouck, ‘Myth-Making in Versailles: The French “liberating mission” in Algeria and Horace Vernet’s Prise de la Smala d’Abd el-Kader’, Immediations 1, no. 4 (2007), 92–109. Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, 2009, 107–108, 125. Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoléon Ier sur le champ de bataille d’Eylau le 9 février 1807, 1808, oil on canvas, 521 × 784 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

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their arms out towards the left, turning in the saddle behind them, while their horses face towards the right. The Russian imploring Napoleon’s pity by clutching his horse in Eylau is echoed in La Smala by the daughter of Abd-el-Kader’s lieutenant SidiEmbarak who similarly begs the Duc d’Aumale for mercy, kneeling and clinging on to his horse and his torso. In this context, the French leaders’ gestures assume a commanding or clement message. In 1855, however, none of the critics reviewing La Smala mentioned these obvious art-historical references to Eylau. This suggests that they had become part of an artist’s common formal repertoire and did not obstruct contemporaries’ impression that, rather than being inf luenced by art-historical precedents, Vernet’s composition was dictated by the historical truth. To authenticate the historical event, Vernet emphasised the documentary basis of La Smala in both text and image. The painting was originally exhibited with an accompanying official account of the capture printed on six pages in the 1845 Salon catalogue.85 Through the press, the public would have further known about Vernet’s extensive research on-site in Algeria, which included interviewing witnesses and executing portraits.86 The portraits and grades of the soldiers were then included in a key that was exhibited alongside La Smala at the Salon.87 The informational purpose of the painting is underlined by both its original title, Prise de la smahla d’Abd-el-Kader à Taguin (16 mai 1843), and its altered 1855 title La Smala: Duc d’Aumale, 16 mai 1843, which are conspicuously descriptive. Historical truth is also suggested in La Smala by the composition and paint handling. The smooth finish of the painting suppresses an obvious painterly touch, the most discernible marker of artificiality. This negation of a painterly style was confirmed by the fact that Edmond About classified Vernet in the tables des métiers of his book about the Universal Exhibition under the artists ‘sans style’.88 The documentary nature of the painting is further evoked by the vantage point. Instead of plunging the viewer into the midst of battle in the style of Gros, the low horizon line and consequently hovering vantage point in La Smala constructs a privileged, omniscient overview similar to that of Lejeune’s Battle of Nazareth.89 To present himself as an objective observer, the artist furthermore included excessive details such as the naked black slave stabbing a watermelon in the left foreground of the painting. As Vandenbrouck has pointed out, these anecdotes that seem irrelevant to the event act as what Roland Barthes calls ‘reality

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Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Musée Royal le 15 Mars 1845 (Paris: Vinchon, imprimeur des musées royaux, 1845), 196–202. Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, 2009, 118. Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, 2009, 107. Paul Boiteau d’Ambly commented negatively on the abundance of portraits in La Smala. See Paul Boiteau d’Ambly, ‘Salon de 1855: VII’, La Propriété littéraire et artistique 1, no. 15 (15 August 1855), 498. Edmond About, Voyage à travers l’exposition des beaux-arts (Paris, 1855), 268. On the privileged overview constructed by Lejeune, see Siegfried, June 1993, 236.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

effects’.90 They authenticate the historical narrative by suggesting that Vernet simply painted the event as it was, without deliberate arrangement or choice. The narrative approach in La Smala stemmed from Vernet’s understanding of history, which was informed by his republican values. Like the battle paintings the artist referenced, his factual approach to history, too, originated in the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century, when, as Stephen Bann puts it, ‘history became selfconscious’.91 History books such as the seven volumes on the history of the crusades, Histoire des croisades, published by Joseph François Michaud from 1812 until 1822, replaced a more general historical discourse with precise and factual studies of individual historical events.92 Jules Michelet’s focus on individuals and specific events in Histoire de la Révolution française (1847–1853) was another milestone of historiography as it marked the passage from a moral and metaphysical to a political view of history. Writing history after the Revolution acquired an unprecedented political urgency. Famously, Adolphe Thiers, a representative of the anti-Bourbon opposition to which other historians such as Thierry, Mignet and Guizot also belonged, argued that the republicanism of the Revolution should be the foremost concern of modern French history.93 Particularly under the Restoration, publishing studies about past events became for the opposition a means of exerting a political voice. Vernet’s career thus fell into an era when the understanding of history underwent fundamental changes, which inevitably meant that its pictorial expression changed as well. As in historiography, the ‘liberal wing’ of academic art theory encouraged narrative accounts of historical action and the representation of recent or contemporary events from French history. Discussing Guizot’s views, Christopher Prendergast describes this view of art as demanding ‘painting to be modern, particular, national, geared to “action”, a view consistent with the “liberal” wing of academic art theory and criticism in the period’.94 Even if a painting did not comply with the aesthetic language of a specific political camp, its critical reception could still be political. Siegfried notes that criticism of a commissioned painting under the First Empire could turn into an oppositional challenge: ‘To condemn contemporary military paintings on aesthetic grounds 90

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Roland Barthes, ‘L’effet de réel’, Communications 11 (1968), 84–89. Vernet’s use of Barthian ‘reality effects’ is pointed out by Vandenbrouck, 2007, 96; and Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, 2009, 104, 109, 112. Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 11. On the emergence of historical awareness in the early nineteenth century, see also Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). Valérie Bajou, ‘De l’agenda au tableau’, in Les guerres de Napoléon: Louis François Lejeune, général et peintre, ed. Valérie Bajou (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2012), 46. On this group and the politics of writing history in the early nineteenth century, see Wright, 1997, 29. Christopher Prendergast, Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros’s La Bataille d’Eylau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 113.

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was to question Napoleon’s programme of artistic patronage and to imply criticism of the military policies that underlay the entire regime.’95 Siegfried ascribes the politicised discourse about art to the fact that, after the Revolution, culture in general became more politicised.96 The equivalent in literature to Vernet’s pictorial rendition of history was, critics in 1855 agreed, the visions of the past evoked in Alexandre Dumas’ historical novels, which featured a similarly descriptive approach. Perrier, declaring that ‘Horace Vernet is the Alexandre Dumas of painting’, thought both artists’ works were united by the same style that was ‘diffuse and without character, the same abundance without limits and without originality, the same gibberish which […] amuses you by its effortlessness’.97 This ‘diffuseness’ of Dumas’ and Vernet’s historical approach correlates with Bann’s definition of ‘extrinsic’ history: as opposed to the scientific approach of ‘intrinsic’ history, ‘extrinsic’ history refers to ‘the inundation of literary, visual, and spectacular forms of expression with a historical tincture’.98 A visual analysis of Vernet’s La Smala will later suggest that, in Vernet’s œuvre, ‘extrinsic’ history is in fact concealed as ‘intrinsic’ history. Vernet’s œuvre has traditionally been associated with a political and artistic compromise between the conservative Classicists and revolutionary Romanticists represented by Ingres and Delacroix. This notion was first theorised when the art historian Léon Rosenthal transferred the political term juste-milieu to the illustrational character of the art of Vernet and Paul Delaroche at the beginning of the twentieth century.99 The term juste-milieu had been coined under the government of Louis-Philippe and described the political strategy that attempted to win over the public and find a middle

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Susan L. Siegfried, ‘The Politicization of Art Criticism in the Post-Revolutionary Press’, in Art Criticism and Its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Michael R. Orwicz (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 21. Siegfried, 1994, 21. On the link between politicised art critical writing in the post-revolutionary period and the general politicisation of life, see Francis Haskell, ‘Art and the Language of Politics’, Journal of European Studies 4 (September 1974), 215–232; Francis Haskell, Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 65–74. ‘Horace Vernet est l’Alexandre Dumas de la peinture […] style diffus et sans caractère, la même abondance sans bornes et sans originalité, le même bavard qui vous amuse par sa facilité’, Charles Perrier, ‘Exposition universelle des beaux-arts: La peinture française – MM. Horace Vernet et Decamps’, L’Artiste 15, no. 5 (17 June 1855), 85. Bann, 1995, 25–26. Léon Rosenthal, Du romantisme au réalisme: Essai sur l’évolution de la peinture en France de 1830 à 1848, ed. Michael Marrinan, first published 1914 (Paris: Macula, 1987), 216. On Vernet as a juste-milieu artist, see Michael Paul Driskel, ‘An Introduction to the Art’, in The Art of the July Monarchy: France 1830 to 1848, exh. cat., Museum of Art and Archaeology, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990).

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

course between legitimacy and republicanism.100 Whereas most reviewers in 1855 did not use the term juste-milieu, Lavergne’s description of Vernet as passing between (au milieu) the two combatants of the Classicist-Romanticist conf lict, comes closest to Rosenthal’s art-historical classification of Vernet as a juste-milieu artist.101 This notion of Vernet as negotiating between different artistic and political camps is accurate, considering that, although the artist started his career as a rebel and later became a chronicler of military deeds, his guiding principle remained throughout his career to paint ‘national art, meaning (art) of the people’.102 This was also expressed in La Smala, which might have lost its original topicality as a vehicle for a political voice by 1855 but which employed a formal language that complied with a liberal understanding of history and pleased the masses. The fragmentation of the painting’s composition into several scenes and the abundance of portraits betray Vernet’s conviction that history is not the expression of general truths but is specifically tied to historical facts and participants. Instead of staging one significant historical moment as representative of an atemporal lesson, Vernet had chosen to show the capture of the Smala in a descriptive, narrative manner. Due to its richness of detail, La Smala was seen as a valuable historical document in 1855. It is important to bear in mind that the painting, like most of Vernet’s visualisations of the Algerian war, was painted for a history museum. Michael Marrinan reminds us that the Musée historique in Versailles for which La Smala was created, was not an ‘arena of aesthetic delight’ but rather ‘an apparatus of historical narration’.103 That the original propagandistic function of La Smala – the glorification of the military deeds of the Duc d’Aumale and therefore of the July Monarchy – had lost its political relevance by 1855 becomes apparent in its changed title. That this now included the name of the protagonist, the Duc d’Aumale, confirms that La Smala had assumed historical connotations. Despite the stereotypical representations and art-historical references mentioned earlier, the painting’s value as historical document was taken for granted 100

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Dictionnaire national ou dictionnaire universel de la langue française, ed. Louis-Nicolas Bescherelle, vol. 2, 2 vols., 4th ed. (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1856) s. v. ‘ juste-milieu.’ Similar definition in Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 9, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1873) s. v. ‘ juste-milieu.’ ‘he passes between the two combatants without getting involved.’ ([…] il passe au milieu des combattants sans leur donner prise.) Lavergne, 1855, 71. I borrow Maxime Du Camp’s words who demanded that all artists should stop producing ‘catholic-aristocratic art’ and instead ‘produce national art, meaning (art) of the people’ ([…] l’art catholico-aristocratique […] faire de l’art national, c’est-à-dire populaire.) Du Camp, 1855, 417. On how this viewing context altered the function and status of the paintings shown in Versailles, see Michael Marrinan, ‘Historical Vision and the Writing of History at LouisPhilippe’s Versailles’, in The Popularization of Images. Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, eds. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 122.

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by most critics.104 Like many others, the art critic Claudius Lavergne wrote in 1855 that Vernet was a ‘faithful historian’ whose ‘perfect exactitude will be one of the primary merits of his œuvre in the eyes of our nephews’.105 The negative criticism of Vernet’s treatment of history, however, outweighed the positive voices. The pictorial emphasis on the function of La Smala as a historical record was traditionally regarded by critics as a descent into simple journalism. The interdependency of text and image, demonstrated by the fact that La Smala was originally shown together with six pages of an official account of the historical event, invited critics such as the Goncourts to remark that ‘battle painting’ was ‘serving the Moniteur. It has become an illustration of tactics, the panoramic staging of military reports; it has descended into trompe-l’œil.’106 Charles Baudelaire, in his insulting 1846 Salon review of Vernet’s œuvre, likewise dismissed the painter’s technique as the ‘method of a feature-page journalist’ in a newspaper.107 It was known that Vernet was a pioneer of the newly invented daguerreotypes, and even Théophile Gautier, usually an advocate of the artist, noted that the trompe-l’œil effect that Vernet’s ‘easy illusions’ created was similar to daguerreotypes.108 The perception of Vernet’s œuvre as journalistic resulted in some contemporaries denying him the status of artist entirely. 104

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Exceptions were Eugène Loudun, who saw in La Smala a fiction that showed only what the commissioners and audience wanted to see, not what had actually happened, and Cham, who ridiculed the unambiguousness of Vernet’s canvases in a caricature. See Loudun, 1855, 82; Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Promenade à l’exposition, par Cham’, Le Charivari (14 June 1855). ‘Historien fidèle […] sa parfaite exactitude fera aux yeux de nos neveux l’un des premiers mérites de ses œuvres.’ Lavergne, 1855, 82. On the use of Vernet’s art for future generations, see also Louis Enault, ‘Exposition Universelle. Beaux-Arts. Horace Vernet’, Le Figaro no. 4 (10 June 1855), 5; and Émile Fourcault de Pavant, Horace Vernet (Paris: Impr. de Beau jeune, 1863), 4. ‘La peinture de batailles […] a été asservie au Moniteur. Elle est devenue une illustration de la tactique, la mise en scène panoramique d’un rapport militaire; elle est descendue au trompe-l’œil.’ Goncourt, 1855, 17. The Moniteur was the official newspaper published by the French governments from 1789 to 1901. The parallel between Vernet’s art and the Moniteur was also drawn by Baudelaire in 1846. See ‘Salon de 1846’, in Charles Baudelaire, Critique d’art suivi de Critique musicale, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 129–130; and Perrier, 17 June 1855, 86. In 1855, La Smala was not exhibited with an accompanying text in the Salon catalogue. Baudelaire, 1992, 18; Charles Blanc, Une famille d’artistes, les trois Vernet: Joseph, Carle, Horace (Paris: H. Laurens, 1898), 139. Théophile Gautier, Les beaux-arts en Europe, 1855, vol. 2 (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1856), 18. For a contemporary account of Vernet’s use of daguerreotypes, see Frédéric Auguste Antoine Goupil, Voyage en Orient fait avec Horace Vernet en 1839 et 1840. Texte et dessins par M. Goupil Fesquet (Paris: Challamel, n.d.), 33–34. Stephen Bann has pointed out Vernet’s pioneering role in the medium. See Bann, 2001, 90–91, 122. Michèle Hannoosh recently dedicated two articles to Vernet’s use of the new medium on his travels in Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Horace Vernet’s “Orient”: Photography and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1839, part I: A Daguerrean Excursion’, The Burlington Magazine 158, no. 1357 (April 2016), 264–271; and

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

In art-theoretical terms, Vernet’s sequential treatment of history in La Smala was problematic and continued to polarise critical opinion in 1855. Traditionalists felt that the painting represented a decline from the highest genre of history painting to the dismissed genre historique. The critic Paul Mantz noted in 1855 that: If history is a simple record, a cold and sterile declaration of facts, the author of La Smala is a history painter; but he does not deserve this title if, under the exterior aspects which clothe the material events, there is spirit, morality, poetry in the human annals.109 Maxime Du Camp endorsed this view, arguing that, rather than being a ‘skilled artisan’, an artist needed to interpret the historical event. An artwork ‘has to make one think’.110 The composition of an artwork was the primary conduit for sifting through the historical narrative for its essence. With its innovative composition, scattering several scenes over a format length of 21.3 metres, La Smala, critics agreed, missed this deeper layer that would have expressed the meaning of the historical fact. Perrier advocated that ‘a painting should not be pleasing for its succession of details, but for the ensemble. The eye and the thought should be able to grasp everything with one glance; a single frame should unite and isolate a single action, and it should not just be the anecdotal report of a series of military episodes.’ Furthermore, the painter could not choose any episode he liked – it had to reveal meaningful action. Perrier admitted that, in La Smala, there ‘might be a certain centre of composition, but there is not a centre of action’. He therefore denied its creator the status of a history painter, noting that, ‘because of this somewhat light way of treating history, M. Vernet is less a painter of history than a painter of genre historique’.111

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Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Horace Vernet’s “Orient”: Photography and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1839, part II: Toward a Historicized Orient: The Daguerreotypes and Their Texts’, The Burlington Magazine 158, no. 1359 ( June 2016), 430–439. ‘Si l’histoire est un simple procès-verbal, une froide et stérile constatation des faits, l’auteur de la Smala est un peintre d’histoire; mais qu’il ne mérite pas ce titre si, sous l’aspect extérieur que revêtent les évènements matériels, il y a dans les annales humaines une âme, une moralité, une poésie.’ Paul Mantz, ‘Salon de 1855’, Revue française 2 (1855), 267. Du Camp, 1855, 156–157. ‘Ce n’est pas par la succession des détails qu’un tableau doit plaire, c’est par l’ensemble. Il faut que l’œil et la pensée puissent du même coup l’embrasser tout entier; il faut qu’un seul cadre réunisse et isole une seule action et ne soit pas seulement le récit anecdotique d’une série d’épisodes militaires. Dans la Smala, il y a bien un certain centre de composition, mais il n’y a pas de centre d’action […]. Cette manière un peu légère de traiter l’histoire fait que M. Vernet est moins peintre d’histoire qu’un peintre de genre historique.’ Perrier, 17 June 1855, 85.

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The lack of unity in La Smala that Charles Perrier denounced was the principal reason why the canvas could not belong to history painting in conservative critics’ eyes. The decentralisation resulted in a perceived lack of the premier coup d’œil, the ability to grasp optically and intellectually the whole scene at once, which was understood by Vernet’s contemporaries as the primary feature of history painting.112 Traditionally, the viewer’s eyes and thoughts had to be led to the main meaning of a historical event by a composition in which all elements focus on a central action.113 In La Smala, however, critics instead found distinct scenes that were not grouped around a single action: the Journal des Arts concluded that each group in La Smala could be a painting in itself.114 One might think that the decentralisation is a natural consequence of the painting’s enormous dimensions, but the critic Ernest Gebaüer, for example, also identified this problem in the smaller Bataille d’Isly.115 According to traditionalists, the fragmented composition was interrelated with three other problems: the lack of idealisation, of intelligence and of passion. The missing unity of action in La Smala was read as symptomatic of Vernet’s failure to put enough thought or intelligence into extracting a specific meaning. Intelligence, according to an 1858 definition, was the ‘comprehension’ and ‘active ability which chooses, and consequently judges, the relative value of several ideas, which it then compares in order to prefer the best’.116 Critics did not believe that an artist who worked as fast as Vernet could possibly possess this intelligence: ‘He executes with a rapidity which does not always leave him time for thinking.’117 A history painter was required to have intelligence to select the main action; in other words, intelligence could be measured by an artist’s ability to interpret reality. Du Camp explained that this process of interpretation was crucial for the artistic treatment of history because

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On the lack of premier coup d’œil in Vernet’s Constantine trio and La Smala, see Marrinan, 1997, 276–285. For an analysis of composition as a site of negotiation between image and idea, see Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400– 1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). Guyot de Frère, ‘Beaux-arts: Exposition (1e article)’, Journal des arts, des sciences et des lettres 27, no. 5 (16 June 1855), 57. Ernest Gebaüer, Les Beaux-arts à l’Exposition Universelle de 1855 (Paris: Librairie napoléonienne, 1855), 65. ‘Intelligence: Compréhension, faculté active qui choisit, et par conséquent juge où pèse la valeur entre plusieurs idées, qu’elle compare afin de préférer la meilleure.’ Dictionnaire national, 1856, s. v. ‘intelligence.’ ‘Il exécute avec une rapidité qui ne lui laisse pas toujours le temps de la réflexion,’ Alphonse de Calonne, ‘Exposition universelle des beaux-arts’, Revue contemporaine 21 (15 September 1855), 132. In 1846, Baudelaire likewise conceded that Vernet did not think while painting. See Baudelaire, 1992, 129.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

‘every historical fact carries a moral, an instruction, an individual philosophy that one has to search for, find and render so that it is easily comprehensible to the public’.118 According to conservatives’ opinions, the scattered composition also indicated that Vernet had not imbued the historical event of the capture of the Smala with the passion required for history painting. Critics worried that the artist was treating grand historical facts like ‘anecdotes’, which in their opinion demonstrated that the artist had ‘zero passion’ and ‘lacked heart’.119 Louis Enault summarised most critics’ objections, arguing that Vernet lacked ‘the supreme feeling of the ideal, the worship, the love, passion, the torment of the beautiful, which must be the only object of art and the sole preoccupation of the artist’.120 Rather than persuading the viewer with passion, the anecdotal approach of La Smala engaged with the viewer through the superficial pleasure of entertainment. That most critics took Vernet’s representation of the taking of the Smala at face value also implies that they thought he had not idealised the event, which was another condition for history painting in conservatives’ eyes. Critics read the lack of idealisation in Vernet’s paintings as a clear sign of the artist’s disdain for art-historical models, which would have taught him to find ‘unity of action’ instead of a ‘mere physical representation of things’.121 The ‘mere physical representation of things’ was, however, precisely Vernet’s concern. His aim, clearly implied in a speech he made to the Academy in 1848, was to show ‘reality’ and historical truth in a convincing manner: Vernet understood art history as a linear, progressive development that successively improves in its representation of nature.122 Having established that conservative critics had denied La Smala the status of a history painting due to its perceived lack of intelligence, passion and idealism, I 118

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‘Chaque fait historique porte en soi une morale, une instruction, une philosophie individuelle qu’il faut chercher, trouver et rendre facilement intelligible au public.’ Du Camp, 1855, 157. ‘nulle passion’, Baudelaire in 1846. See Baudelaire, 1992, 130. ‘He lacks heart. A battle is for him a feast, and on his canvases the grandest facts of history are reduced to the proportions of anecdotes.’ (Le cœur lui manque. Une bataille est pour lui une fête, et les plus grands faits de l’histoire se rapetissent sur ses toiles aux proportions de l’anecdote.) Mantz, 1855, 130. ‘sentiment suprême de l’idéal, le culte, l’amour, la passion, le tourment du beau, qui doit être le seul objet de l’art et l’unique préoccupation de l’artiste’, Enault, 10 June 1855, 5. ‘I believe that intelligence belongs to all arts, and that by holding it in a regrettable state of inferiority one reduces it unceasingly and intentionally to the mere physical representation of things.’ ( Je crois que l’intelligence appartient à tous les arts, et que c’est en tenir un dans un état regrettable d’infériorité que de la réduire sans cesse et intentionnellement à la seule représentation physique des choses.) Du Camp, 1855, 157; Perrier, 17 June 1855, 85. Horace Vernet, ‘Des anciens Hébreux et des Arabes modernes’, L’Artiste 1 (15 August 1848), 235. Melanie Vandenbrouck and I have argued that this attidude did not guard Vernet from depicting ‘reality’ with a tint of stereotypes typical for his day; see Julia Thoma and Melanie Vandenbrouck, ‘From Battlefields to Scriptures: Horace Vernet’s Vision of the “Orient”’, in

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will now explore the painting’s positive reception in 1855. In doing so, I will show how Vernet’s positivist attitude enabled him to revitalise the genre of military painting and emerge as an exponent of modernity. That Vernet was ‘of his time’ became especially apparent to critics in 1855 in his depictions of figures, which diverged from academic principles in favour of a more ‘truthful’ style. This approach violated the principle of tranquil repose theorised by Lessing in the eighteenth century on the example of the suppressed scream of Laocoön, which persisted into the nineteenth century.123 In contrast to this call for composure, Vernet imbued his figures with a sense of spontaneity and liveliness that is striking: this is illustrated, for example, by the French chasseur just behind the tent in the centre of La Smala staggering back in his saddle, his mouth open, eyes widened, while striking out with his bayonet to land the final blow against the naked black man attacking him. A caricature by Cham suggests that the informal poses in Vernet’s paintings were a recent novelty for history painting; it shows visitors to Vernet’s gallery space dancing around and is accompanied by a caption explaining that one can now do whatever one wants with one’s arms and legs.124 Even the traditionalist Perrier praised Vernet for rejecting the stiff postures of traditional history painting in favour of the animated movements of his figures, noting that, in Vernet’s paintings, the ‘persons do not pose, they act (agissent)’.125 The legitimist Claudius Lavergne added that Vernet’s figures did not need idealisation because the artist had realised that the truth was beautiful enough.126 Théophile Gautier, the only critic who frequently made the connection between Vernet’s novel approach and the notion of modernity, noted: ‘M. Horace Vernet will have the glory to have been of his epoch, while so many artists of a superior merit […] enclose themselves in the sphere of the ideal and, not descending from it, live abstractly in the centuries of Pericles.’127 Gautier acknowledged that Vernet’s attempt to depict ‘reality’ in a truthful manner in fact demanded the consideration that conservatives had accused him of lacking: ‘Nothing looks easier, and nothing is more difficult.’128 Gautier also saw an essentially modern trait in Vernet’s compositional fragmentation of narrative. The composition of La Smala, while not complying with the aca-

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Aller(s)-Retour(s): Nineteenth-Century France in Motion (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie’, in Literaturtheoretische und ästhetische Schriften, ed. Albert Meier, first published 1766 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006). Cham (Amédée de Noé), 14 June 1855. ‘les personnages ne posent pas, ils agissent’, Perrier, 17 June 1855, 86. Lavergne, 1855, 82. ‘M. Horace Vernet aura cette gloire d’avoir été de son époque, lorsque tant d’artistes d’un mérite supérieur […] se renfermaient dans la sphère de l’idéal et n’en descendaient pas, vivant abstraitement aux siècles de Périclès.’ Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 12. ‘Rien n’a l’air plus simple en apparence, et rien n’est plus difficile.’ Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 11.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

demic principles of history painting, proved Vernet’s genius at dealing with ‘a complex and simultaneous action with all its peripheries’; the art critic described Vernet’s novel approach as composing several focuses, mini-centres of action with figures grouped around them, that are linked by ‘intermediary episodes’.129 He declared that, with simultaneous scenes in his early works Jemmapes, Hanau, Valmy and Montmirail, Vernet had ended the traditional manner of depicting history because ‘they approach the far more probable reality’.130 Looking at the decentralised composition of La Smala, one can indeed think of no more appropriate way of showing the devastation of this town, which was described in the livret, the Salon catalogue, as the ‘centre, from which all the orders came, where all the important business was transacted’.131 The fragmentation of the composition thus supplied a meaning for the narrative, symbolising the Smala’s dissolution. Yet, rather than deriving from ‘reality’, Vernet’s innovative composition stemmed from another source beyond the fine arts canon: the panorama. That Vernet’s art was indebted to the techniques of the panorama was suggested by art critics at the time and has been the subject of recent scholarship, notably in studies by Michael Marrian, Melanie Vandenbrouck and Katie Hornstein.132 Their observations about the compositional structure of Vernet’s paintings and the resulting engaged spectatorship, which was similar to that which panormas inspired, form the basis for my interest in the political effects of this form of viewing, as the following discussion will highlight. Panoramas, invented around the turn of the nineteenth century, were rotundas inside which a circular painting surrounded the spectator to create an illusion of being ‘inside the painting’. Subjects that lent themselves to this viewing context were mainly cityscapes and battles.133 There are striking similarities between La Smala and panoramas, as Marrinan and Hornstein have established.134 Vernet was the former teacher of the leading panorama artist of the nineteenth century, Charles Langlois, and would have had direct and frequent access to panoramas.135 Until only two months before La 129 130 131 132

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‘une action complexe et simultanée avec toutes ses péripéties’, ‘épisodes intermédiaires’, Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 13, 16. ‘se rapprochent bien davantage de la réalité probable,’ Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 12. ‘un centre, d’où partaient tous les ordres, où se traitaient toutes les affaires importantes.’ Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Musée Royal le 15 Mars 1845, 1845, 197. See Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 15; Marrinan, 1997, 288–291; Vandenbrouck, 2007, 113; John Zarobell, Empire of Landscape: Space and Ideology in French Colonial Algeria (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010), 45–46; Hornstein, 2010, 220, 222. As Melanie Vandenbrouck-Przybylski has pointed out to me in this context, La Smala is both a cityscape and a battle. Marrinan, 1997, 285–289; Hornstein, 2010, 222. Horace Vernet about Langlois: ‘M. Langlois is of my pupils the one I pride myself on most.’ (M. Langlois est de mes élèves celui dont je m’honore le plus.) Service historique de la Défense, Vincennes, Yh163 dossier Langlois, cited in Jean-Charles Langlois (1789–1870): Le spectacle de l’histoire, eds. Caroline Joubert and François Robichon, exh. cat., Musée des

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Smala was on display at the Universal Exhibition, Langlois’ Panorama de la bataille des Pyramides, showing a First Empire battle, had been displayed on the Champs-Elysées (now destroyed but the scaled models have survived) (Pl. 2).136 The spectator of Langlois’ panorama saw the Bataille des Pyramides from the raised terrace of a house in the Mameluk camp and therefore assumed the same raised viewpoint that Vernet had constructed in La Smala. Like Vernet’s painting, the Bataille des Pyramides was made up of countless scenes, including views of the Egyptian landscape, groups of f leeing civilians, and Mameluk camps being attacked by the French, as well as Napoleon, mounted on a white horse and directing the battle. La Smala’s extreme dimensions were more than matched by the panorama, which was five times as long, spreading out over a canvas length of approximately one hundred metres of round canvas that formed 360 degrees. The two art forms thus resembled one another not only in their arrangements of a historical narrative but also in their physical magnitude. Gautier in fact commented in 1856 that ‘(La Smala), of an extraordinary dimension and much longer than high […] could almost be hung inside a rotunda like […] the Pyramides.’137 The illusion of reality in panoramas seemed especially convincing because the viewers were surrounded by battle, gaining the impression that, as Bourseul would write in 1874, ‘this is no longer the image of a theatre of war, but the theatre of war itself that (the spectator) has before his eyes’.138 The term ‘panorama’ derives from the Greek ‘total view’; the spectator would stand on a pedestal in the centre of the rotunda and peer through darkness at the painting lit by small windows or gaslights. He could not see where the painting ended vertically as he was standing below a cone-shaped dome that blocked the view of the upper edges, while the raised platform prohibited the view of the lower edges of the canvas. The result of this arrangement was that the paintings seemed to have ‘neither top nor bottom, neither beginning nor end, and [were] thus the image of the infinite’.139 In the 1830s Langlois further diminished the barrier between the viewer and the represented image by adding actual objects in the foreground of the canvas that smoothly led into the painted image, as both image and

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Beaux-Arts de Caen (Paris: Somogy, 2005), 20. Parallel to his military career, which had started with his service in the Grande Armée, Langlois had studied with Géricault and, later, with Vernet and made his debut at the Salon in 1822. The panorama was displayed in a rotunda on the Champs-Élysées from 20 February 1853 to March 1855; see Jean-Charles Langlois (1789–1870): Le spectacle de l’histoire, 2005, 124. ‘(La Smala), d’une dimension extraordinaire et beaucoup plus large que haute […] pourrait presque s’appliquer à l’intérieur d’une rotonde comme […] des Pyramides.’ Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 15. ‘Ce n’est plus l’image du champ de bataille, mais le champ de bataille lui-même qu’il a sous les yeux.’ E. Ch. Bourseul, Biographie du Colonel Langlois commandeur de l’ordre de la Légion d’Honneur … fondateur et auteur des panoramas militaires (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1874), 4. ‘(ces toiles) n’ont ni haut ni bas, ni commencement ni fin, et sont ainsi l’image de l’infini.’ Bourseul, 1874, 12.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

props had the same relative proportions. Schwartz notes that panoramas, by denying the viewer any points of reference, create a ‘substitute reality’.140 While Vernet’s La Smala, with its heightened suggestion of ‘reality’, already threatened to transgress the boundaries of fine arts, contemporaries could not possibly concede that panoramas might be seen as art.141 Arsène Alexandre affords panoramas only a short paragraph in his otherwise expansive book Histoire de la peinture militaire en France (1889) because ‘We do not consider panoramas to be works of art at all.’142 Instead of explaining why panoramas may not be regarded as art, he cites the fact that there are no ‘retired’ panoramas to be found in museums.143 It is true that, after his panoramas had served their purpose and been replaced by new ones, Langlois often destroyed them himself.144 That panoramas were not considered as art seems surprising as, physically, their canvases differed from other paintings only in their circular shape, and they were inextricably linked to art history: Langlois had visited Versailles to see Louis François Lejeune’s 1806 Bataille des Pyramides before starting work on his panorama (Pl. 3).145 There are in fact many similarities between the works of Langlois and Lejeune, such as the low horizon and the diffuse Orientalist light. Also, no one doubted the instructive mission of panoramas, as they appealed to the intellect as much as to the senses, functioning, according to Bourseul, as a ‘history lesson in action’.146 Panoramas, however, seem to have taken the suggestion of reality to a level considered unacceptable for fine arts. Bourseul noted that a panorama is like a drama performed at a theatre, an impression that no battle painting, even if painted by a ‘grand maître’, could achieve.147 His somewhat naïve attempt at a (non)definition – a panorama ‘is not a painting, because all painting has a frame; it is not a battle, because all battles are loud’ – assigns this form of visualisation to a place somewhere between art and reality.148 That La 140 141

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Schwartz, 1999, 151. Langlois’ military paintings were also never hung as prominently at the Salons as other officially commissioned military paintings. For example, Langlois’ Passage de la Linth, le 25 septembre 1799, par la division Soult (no. 1765) hung in the staircase at the Salon of 1850–1851, according to Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Exposition des artistes vivants, 1850 (Paris: Comon, 1851), 50. ‘Nous ne considérons guère les panoramas comme des œuvres d’art.’ Arsène Alexandre, Histoire de la peinture militaire en France (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1889), 276. ‘One last word: if one finds we are a bit too summary with the chapter of the panoramas, we simply ask which museum kept those that are no longer in service.’ (Un dernier mot: si on trouve que nous sommes un peu trop sommaires sur le chapitre des panoramas, nous demanderons simplement quel musée a recueilli ceux qui ne servent plus.) Alexandre, 1889, 277. Jean-Charles Langlois (1789–1870): Le spectacle de l’histoire, 2005, 24. Jean-Charles Langlois (1789–1870): Le spectacle de l’histoire, 2005, 24. ‘leçon d’histoire en action’, Bourseul, 1874, 75. Bourseul, 1874, 68. ‘Ce n’est pas un tableau, car tout tableau a un cadre; ce n’est pas une bataille, car toute bataille est bruyante.’ Bourseul, 1874, 69.

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Smala employed similar formal devices to this non-art form to suggest ‘reality’ sheds further light on why conservative critics struggled to accept the painting as part of the canon of high art. La Smala targeted the same bourgeois audience as did panoramas. Admittedly, both panoramas and Vernet’s painting were devised for a public space and therefore sought to satisfy a varied audience. Delécluze noted that Vernet’s father, Carle Vernet, had first made military paintings for a broad public that included ‘the amateur of paintings, the historian and the soldier who wishes to educate himself ’.149 The bourgeoisie, however, constituted the main audience of Vernet’s grandes machines and consequently an attack on Vernet’s art was often a form of social criticism of this unpopular class.150 Eugène Loudun characterised the bourgeoisie condescendingly as an ‘industrial society which spends its day earning money, and after its business wishes to amuse itself ’.151 The sensationalism of the newly forming Parisian mass culture was catered to by panoramas and La Smala, both presenting battles as spectacles. As Marrinan and Hornstein have discussed, La Smala and Langlois’ panoramas operated similarly in their command over the viewer’s space in that they both demanded physical involvement from the viewer.152 To take in the whole battle in a panorama booth, the visitor had to move and turn around to see all scenes, which were part of the historical narrative. Similarly, Vernet made his audience ‘wander’ in front of La Smala, as Gautier noted, ‘to capture all its various details’.153 The scattered compositions, rather than the canvas sizes, of La Smala and of panoramas were the main reason for the viewers having to move around in order to grasp the whole subject. This becomes apparent in a comparison drawn by the incumbent director of the Musées Nationaux, Auguste Jeanron, between the traditional composition of Paul Veronese’s Noces de Cana (1563; Fig. 9) and La Smala on the occasion when La Smala was literally hung to cover Veronese’s painting at the 1845 Salon.154

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‘également l’amateur de peinture, l’historien et le militaire qui veut s’instruire’, Delécluze, 1856, 228. Théophile Silvestre reproached Vernet for having invented new ways of depicting history with the sole aim of amusing the ‘vulgar’ public in Théophile Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants, études d’après nature: Horace Vernet (Paris: E. Blanchard, 1857), 35–36. ‘une société industrielle qui passe sa journée à gagner de l’argent, et après ses affaires, veut s’amuser’, Loudun, 1855, 120, 123. Marrinan, 1997, 285–289; Hornstein, 2010, 222. ‘The eye could not embrace (the scene) with one glance, and the length one has to wander in order to seize all the various details of it, breaks with the old practices of art.’ (L’œil ne saurait embrasser d’un regard, et le long de laquelle il faut marcher pour en saisir les différents détails, rompt avec les anciennes habitudes de l’art.) Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 16. Silvestre negatively remarked that the number of episodes divided the spectator’s attention, dragging his eyes from one side of the picture frame to the other. See Silvestre, 1857 (I), 33. Review by Auguste Jeanron, originally published by the newspaper La Pandore in 1845 according to Silvestre, 1857 (I), 41.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

Fig. 9:  Paolo Veronese, Les Noces de Cana, 1563, oil on canvas, 677 × 994 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Although Noces de Cana is also colossal at almost seven by ten metres, Veronese assigned the spectator a particular spot in front of the painting by placing the main action – Christ performing the miracle – in the centre, while Vernet’s audience had to move to piece together the action of the capture of the Smala.155 In La Smala, the scene that might be considered crucial – the attack by the French – was located five metres left of the centre of the canvas and banished to the middle ground. Apart from the composition, the realistic renderings of each scene also encouraged movement, according to Silvestre, as ‘the vulgar’ wanted to see each scene from ‘close up, meaning at nose-length; to count many things and understand them, without ref lection and without effort’.156 Vernet thus recreated the panorama’s illusion of being in the midst of a battle by fragmenting one battle into several scenes, which the viewer then had to combine into a whole. That the formula of incorporating panoramic devices into fine arts had its limits, Vernet learned the hard way with a commission by the Second Republic shown at

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Jeanron writing for La Pandore (1845), cited in Silvestre, 1857 (I), 41. ‘Le vulgaire aime à voir la peinture de très-près, c’est-à-dire à longueur de nez; d’y compter et d’y comprendre, sans réflexion et sans effort, beaucoup de choses.’ Silvestre, 1857 (I), 35.

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the Salon of 1852 (but, tellingly, not in 1855) (Fig. 10).157 To depict the French army’s engagement at the Siege of Rome in 1849, Vernet took the distribution of the narrative across the canvas to extremes, leading critics to dub his Siège de Rome, prise du bastion no. 8 (30 juin 1849) ‘artistic suicide’.158 Measuring almost five metres by ten, the painting shows Rome in the far background and, in the foreground, innumerable episodes relating to the French siege, such as the taking of prisoners.159 Although La Smala was eleven metres longer than the Siège de Rome, the latter seemed to contemporaries more like a panorama than the former. Alphonse de Calonne fulminated in 1852 that, this time, Vernet had crossed the line separating fine arts and the panorama: La Smala was the last limit a canvas could reach without becoming a panorama screen. It was not to be the same with the Siège de Rome; this time the frontier has been crossed; we are at a Panorama des Champs-Elysées, in front of a fragment of a circular painting.160 That de Calonne perceived the painting as a fragment of a larger whole suggests that the critic knew that Vernet had originally been commissioned to paint a triptych of the siege. In the event, he had produced only the one painting – probably, as Hornstein suggests, on account of the unpopularity of this military conf lict with the public.161 Amedée Durande, in his biography of Vernet, noted that the fraught political situation had even forced Vernet to hide his painting for fear that it might be destroyed.162 The Siège de Rome does indeed appear more than La Smala like a fragment of a larger whole, as the action seems arbitrarily cut off by the painting’s margins and the arrangement of 157

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According to the painting file in Versailles and Claire Constans, Musée national du château de Versailles: Catalogue des Peintures (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1980), cat. 4548. Ruutz-Rees suggests that Vernet’s painting was commissioned by Napoleon III in 1852 and not under the Second Republic, see Janet Emily Meugens Ruutz-Rees, Horace Vernet (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1880), 34. The painting was commissioned from Vernet in 1850 according to Renaudeau, 2000, 489. Nadar cited in Maxime Du Camp, ‘Beaux-Arts. Salon de 1852. Peinture d’histoire – peinture de genre’, Revue de Paris (May 1852), 58. Eudore Soulié, Notice du Musée national de Versailles. Premier étage, vol. 2 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, 1881), 125. According to the Agence photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux, the painting is currently rolled up and cannot be photographed. ‘La Smala était la dernière limite à laquelle put atteindre un tableau sans devenir une toile de panorama. Il n’en devait pas être de même du Siége de Rome; cette fois la frontière est franchie; nous sommes au Panorama des Champs-Elysées, en face d’un fragment de peinture circulaire.’ Calonne added that these kinds of ‘toiles de théâtres ou de panoramas’ will soon be forgotten, see Alphonse de Calonne, ‘Salon de 1852’, Revue contemporaine 1 (May 1852), 137. Hornstein, 2010, 236. Durande, 1864, 304.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

Fig. 10:  Horace Vernet, Siège de Rome, prise du bastion no. 8, qui a déterminé la reddition de Rome, par l’armée française en 1849, 1852, oil on canvas, 489 × 997 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

episodes depicted does not follow the same rough division – with the attackers mainly on the left and the attacked mainly on the right – as in La Smala. In that regard, the Siège de Rome evokes more the effect of a real panorama, where the viewer could at times be confronted with a fragment displaying no clear actions of importance for the narrative. The general impression of Siège de Rome was one of confusion. Gautier attributed this to the canvas size, which exceeded the viewer’s field of vision and thus did not allow him to take everything in at once or else asked him to step so far back that he could discern no details.163 The seemingly random sequence of episodes across the canvas’ length attracted similar comments from most critics who reviewed the painting, and was mocked in a caricature by Bertall.164 This caricature divides Vernet’s painting into several canvases, suggesting that he was simply trying to circumvent the restriction 163 164

Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1852 (Troisième article): MM. Horace Vernet, Glaize, Tabar, Debon, Jaquand, Galabert’, La Presse (7 May 1852), 1–2. Bertall, ‘Couleur du Salon de 1852, ou le Salon dépeint et dessiné’, Journal pour rire no. 29 (16 April 1852), 1.

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on the number of paintings each artist was allowed to submit to the Salon. Several individual episodes show man-to-man combats, but the episodes that stood out were judged as profane. Gautier had previously admired Vernet for being ‘of his time’ by introducing rebellious elements to painting, but now he noted that the only episode that stood out for him showed a French soldier enjoying a piece of ham. His suggested title for the painting, ‘The Taking of the Ham’, registers the discrepancy between the canvas’ giant format and the perceived banality of its subject.165 The Siège de Rome entered a direct dialogue with La Smala when the two paintings were hung opposite one another in Versailles in the 1850s.166 The contrast between the outcomes of the two experiments with panoramic strategies – the public’s lack of interest in the one as opposed to the other’s popularity as a piece of entertainment – was thus reinforced. The employment of panoramic strategies in La Smala is not the only aspect of the painting that made it entertaining. The fact that Vernet, according to contemporaries, avoided any depictions of violence or blood in his battle paintings appeared to confirm the notion that his art functioned as mere entertainment.167 The Journal des Arts was astounded that there was no blood in Vernet’s military paintings and declared sarcastically that this was ‘surely a new way of representing the end of a battle’.168 Paul Boiteau d’Ambly noted that Vernet’s salle at the exhibition resembled a circus, in that it did not ask the exhibition viewer to feel pity for the wounded but sought only to entertain: ‘This (Vernet’s) room is a camp: one drums there for recall, […], one hears there the noise of the shootings and the cannonades; but it is a lot like at the circus: little blood is (being) shed, and nobody thinks of crying over the fate of those who seem to be dead.’169 In this, Vernet again followed Lejeune, whose paintings also offered, as Siegfried observes, ‘a reassuring picture of war that allowed his audience to forget about the carnage and emotional cost of combat and concentrate instead on a glorious adventure of national victory’.170

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Gautier, 7 May 1852. By 1860, La Smala and Siège de Rome hung in the Salle de la Smala, room 104. See Soulié, 1881, vol. 2, 126. As the critical reception of 1855 demonstrates, contemporaries did not perceive La Smala as a violent painting. Looking at the painting today, one has to agree with Hélène Gill, who asserts that La Smala visualises a raid more than a proper battle. See Hélène Gill, The Language of French Orientalist Painting (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), S. 22. ‘C’est, assurément, une manière toute nouvelle de représenter la fin d’une grande bataille.’ Guyot de Frère, 16 June 1855, 57. ‘Cette salle est un camp: on y bat le rappel […], on y entend le bruit des fusillades et des canonnades; mais c’est à peu près comme au Cirque: il n’y a pas beaucoup de sang versé, et personne ne songe à pleurer sur le sort de ceux qui ont l’air d’être morts.’ Boiteau d’Ambly, 15 August 1855, 498. Siegfried, June 1993, 248.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

The lack of violence in Vernet’s paintings would have been in line with the academic preference for aesthetic repose, but in La Smala Vernet simply replaced the menacing effect of the literal depiction of violence with an indirectly threatening effect on the viewer. To Vandenbrouck’s and Hornstein’s argument that the trompe l’œil effect of individual elements of La Smala resulted in a more engaged spectatorship, one may therefore add, based on the 1855 critical reception, that these elements transferred the mere depiction of an attack to the experience of an attack.171 Contemporaries indeed located the violence in the composition of the painting: the attacking group of French cavalry in the centre of the left half of the canvas is depicted as speeding not towards the Algerian enemy, but towards the viewer.172 The Journal des Arts noted how some of the figures in La Smala seemed to be moving towards the spectator, a trompe-l’œil effect that the article explained was created by Vernet’s use of foreshortening: A singularity in the composition, it is a form of artifice to direct the walk of the figures towards the spectator, by means of taking shortcuts. This is especially apparent in the charging hunters who advance threateningly and without intermediaries towards the peaceful spectator of the painting, so that one does not know at all with whom they are fighting.173 As this quotation demonstrates, the author of the article found this involvement menacing, because there was no repoussoir that would lead him gently into the scene or bear the brunt of the charge of the horsemen. Instead, as Vandenbrouck has pointed out, only the horses’ hooves function as repoussoirs, seeming to pierce through the canvas into the space of the viewer.174 The ‘peaceful spectator’ had to ask himself whether he was under attack, as some of the combatants facing him seemed to have no one else to

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Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, 2009, 113. Similarly, Hornstein notes that the protruding elements of Vernet’s canvases created a new kind of pictorial space similar to Langlois’ panoramas, concluding that this resulted in a more engaged spectatorship. See Hornstein, 2010, 222. ‘As to the groups of three or four cavaliers that speed at full gallop towards the spectators, […] it is obvious that they do not belong to anything and that they act each on their own behalf, without worrying about the effect they have been asked to produce.’ (Quant aux groupes de trois ou quatre cavaliers qui arrivent à fond de train sur les spectateurs, […] il est bien évident qu’ils n’appartiennent à rien et qu’ils agissent chacun pour leur compte, sans s’inquiéter de l’effet qu’ils sont appelés à produire.) Perrier, 17 June 1855, 85–86. See also Baudelaire in 1845, in Baudelaire, 1992, 18. ‘Une singularité dans la composition, c’est une sorte d’affectation à diriger la marche des figures vers le spectateur, au moyen de raccourcis. Cela se remarque surtout dans la charge des chasseurs qui s’avancent menaçants et sans intermédiaires, sur les paisibles visiteurs du tableau, de sorte qu’on ne sait trop à qui en ont les combattants.’ Guyot de Frère, 16 June 1855, 57. Pointed out by Melanie Vandenbrouck in conversation.

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Fig. 11:  Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Promenade à l’exposition, par Cham’, Le Charivari (14 June 1855).

fight.175 A caricature by Cham plays on this special effect of Vernet’s gallery space; it shows a man attempting to drag his frightened wife to the exhibition, explaining to her that Vernet’s paintings are not actually dangerous (Fig. 11).176 The inclusion of the viewer through this confrontational rhetoric had a thrilling effect and was similar to the entertainment provided by the viewing experience of the all-embracing panorama – except that the figures of La Smala seemed to invade the viewer’s space, whereas the viewer seemed to step into the panorama to join the figures depicted there. I would like to apply to La Smala the observation that the physical participation of the spectator that panoramas encouraged had propagandistic implications as it served 175

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However, not every contemporary felt that the threatening immediacy was inherent in the composition and Calonne of the Revue contemporaine simply explained that the paintings were hung too closely to the spectator in the small exhibition space: ‘The two large paintings of La Smala and the Bataille de l’Isly are placed too close to the spectator.’ (Les deux grandes toiles de la Smala et de la Bataille de l’Isly sont placées trop près du spectateur.) Calonne, 15 September 1855, 132. ‘Now now, a bit of courage, my love! I assure you that it is not dangerous to go in front of the battles by M. Horace Vernet; come and see.’ (Voyons, un peu de courage, ma chère! je t’assure qu’il n’y a aucun danger à courir devant les batailles de M. Horace Vernet; viens voir ça.) Cham (Amédée de Noé), 14 June 1855.

Vernet’s retrospective: History painting in question

to distract the viewer from intellectual engagement with the historical narrative. Maurice Samuels has argued that, although panoramas of historical events gave the viewer the illusion of control over the past, this spectacular way of seeing history forced him into passivity.177 Discussing Marx’s statement about the Second Empire as mere imitation, Samuels contends that the panorama served the ruling class in that it transformed ‘historical events into objects of vision’, ‘undermin(ing) the impetus to action’. He concludes that ‘by turning the people into viewers of revolutionary history, it effectively eliminates the danger of future revolution’.178 Similarly, David Baguley interprets Napoleon III’s display of military prowess as a way of ‘ritualiz(ing) epic exploits in order not to have to repeat them in reality’.179 Concurring with Samuels’ and Baguley’s arguments, one can assert that Bataille des Pyramides also functioned as a device of Napoleon III’s populist politics by commemorating Bonapartist military action while at the same time making the bourgeoisie, the main viewers of the panoramas, complacent through distraction. Vernet’s canvas likewise encouraged mental passivity by stimulating physical movement. The notion of distraction in relation to Vernet’s œuvre is explicitly voiced in Laurent-Pichat’s observation of 1861 that ‘Vernet has botched up a colossal album, much as one might draw matchstick men to amuse children’.180 The fear that the rising culture of spectacle of the mid-nineteenth century was desensitising the bourgeoisie was already beginning to find expression. In his novel L’Éducation sentimentale (first published in 1869), Gustave Flaubert gives a striking warning of how spectacle culture has diminished his protagonist’s reaction to human suffering when he sees civilians wounded in the street during the Revolution of 1848: ‘The wounded falling all around him and the dead lying on the ground didn’t seem really dead or wounded. It was like being at a show.’181 Similarly, the critical reviews of La Smala registered not even a trace of pity for the scattered Algerian families and the untended babies in the foreground of the painting; there was thus no danger of the historical narrative provoking a critique of the French army’s ethics. The shared visual experience of large and varied crowds to which panoramas and La Smala gave rise was echoed in the painting by the non-hierarchical arrangement of figures. By including so many soldiers of relatively low rank in his paintings and by not giving his compositions a focus, Vernet expressed the liberal notion of the political 177 178 179 180 181

Maurice Samuels, ‘Realizing the Past: History and Spectacle in Balzac’s Adieu’, Representations 79, no. 1 (Summer 2002), 92. Samuels, Summer 2002, 92. Baguley, 2000, 159. ‘Vernet a bâclé un album colossal, comme on fait des bonshommes pour distraire des enfants,’ Léon Laurent-Pichat, Notes sur le Salon de 1861 (Lyon: L’Imprimerie du Progrès, 1861), 2. ‘Les blessés qui tombaient, les morts étendus n’avaient pas l’air de vrais blessés, de vrais morts. Il lui semblait assister à un spectacle.’ Gustave Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale: Histoire d’un jeune homme (Paris: G. Charpentier et Cie., 1889), 351.

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weight of the (French) people. Instead of focusing on ‘the beauty of heroic types’, he showed what Gautier praised as ‘the multiple personages of the military drama’.182 The critic further acknowledged the political implications of Vernet’s break with tradition, arguing that the artist elevated ‘the people’ to the status of Homeric heroes: ‘It was necessary for him to create design, colour and arrangement to paint this collective hero which one calls the army, and which is worth just as much as Achilles or Hector.’183 This ideological shift can be traced back to the early nineteenth century; as Siegfried has demonstrated, the shift of focus from the sovereign or commander-in-chief to ‘the body of the army as a collective unit of citizens’ first developed in the ideological context of patriotic militarism from 1800 and under the First Empire.184 In Vernet’s painting, the notion of the ‘collective hero’ is also expressed pictorially through the absence of any clear hierarchy of figures. That a focused composition could carry authoritarian connotations is confirmed by Silvestre’s observation that a ‘real painter’ of history would have sacrificed the details for the ensemble ‘just as a dictator fires at rebels to save the unity of the reign’.185 One could thus call Vernet’s equal pictorial attention to several scenes a fundamentally democratic way of composing a picture.186 Whereas it was claimed that one visited Ingres’ exhibition space at the Universal Exhibition out of a sense of duty, Vernet’s retrospective in 1855 had all the attraction of a panorama rotunda.187 Edmond About addressed his readers about the feeling of comfort they had in Vernet’s room in contrast to that of Ingres: ‘In front of La Smala by Vernet, you felt wonderfully at ease. You breathed deeply; you promised to buy your little boy a horse. If you had run into M. Horace Vernet, you would have invited him to dinner.’188 In Vernet’s room, the visitor could gaze at women whose clothes seemed to be slipping off at the attack by potent French soldiers; he could let his mind wander

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‘les multiples personnages du drame militaire’, Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 14. Loudun remarked: ‘In the battles, it is not the beauty of the heroic types that he (Vernet) is looking for, but the general movement, the marching battalions well ordered in long lines.’ (Dans les combats, ce n’est pas la beauté des types héroïques qu’il cherche, c’est le mouvement général, les bataillons marchant en bon ordre en longues lignes.) Loudun, 1855, 118–119. ‘Il lui a fallu tout créer, dessin, couleur, arrangement, pour peindre ce héros collectif qu’on appelle l’armée, et qui vaut bien Achille ou Hector.’ Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 12. Siegfried, June 1993, 251. ‘comme un dictateur mitraille les rebelles pour sauver l’unité du pouvoir’, Silvestre, 1857 (I), 33. However, it is important to note that this only applies to the French figures in Vernet’s paintings. Claude (Noémi) Vignon (Cadiot), Exposition Universelle de 1855: Beaux-arts (Paris: Librairie d’Auguste Fontaine, 1855), 214. ‘Devant la Smala de M. Horace Vernet, vous vous êtes sentis merveilleusement à l’aise. Vous avez respiré à pleins poumons, vous avez promis à votre petit garçon de lui acheter un cheval. Si vous aviez rencontré M. Horace Vernet, vous l’auriez invité à dîner.’ About, 1855, 116.

Vernet’s art in the service of the Second Empire

to foreign lands aided by realistically rendered ethnographic detail; he could move, and halt in front of individual scenes for a more intimate contemplation of shiny military uniforms. Here, even war seemed pleasurable, and the Algerians, who were in fact threatening French dominance in 1855, were defeated. The Smala, the Algerians’ centre of power, was smashed and scattered across a giant canvas. Only the art critics despaired over Vernet’s deathblow to history painting: this was a happy space. Pleasing the crowds and patrons was, however, only one incentive for Vernet’s novel composition. His naturalistic depiction of history on a grand scale also stemmed from his republican understanding of history, combined with his positivist artistic attitude. Firmly rooted in the present, Vernet’s work fitted uneasily into the traditional category of history painting: ‘Through a truly modern innovation,’ marvelled Théophile Gautier in 1855, ‘the artist has introduced the panorama into history painting.’189

Vernet’s art in the service of the Second Empire Whereas Vernet had long been a controversial figure to the critics, he finally became canonical through his retrospective at the Universal Exhibition of 1855, being regarded as the master painter of military paintings. Why, however, would the young government choose to be represented by the official military painter of the previous regime? The visitor to the Universal Exhibition might have even been able to find visual evidence for the political history of Vernet’s works in their damaged condition: as mentioned earlier, during the Revolution of 1848, when Louis-Philippe had fallen out of favour, Vernet’s four battle paintings – Jemmapes, Montmirail, Valmy and Hanau – had been damaged by fire.190 Thus, by that year, Vernet’s œuvre was firmly associated with the July Monarchy. Yet, despite this, the Second Empire dedicated its most prominent exhibition space at the Universal Exposition to Vernet, to represent the arts of France before a world public. In fact, the organiser, Prince Napoleon, was so keen to put Vernet into the service of the new regime that he ordered the transport of the enormous La Smala from Versailles to the Palais des beaux-arts. This meant that the retrospective included ten works painted under the Restoration and eight executed under the July Monarchy, and only four dating from the Second Empire itself. The reasons for Vernet’s prominent presence at the Universal Exhibition are in fact straightforward and of a political, rather than artistic, nature. Not only were the initial production and reception of Vernet’s art politicised, but the paintings also continued to be used politically in subsequent decades. In terms of subject matter, this continuation could be seen as natural given that the Armée d’Afrique continued to serve 189 190

‘L’artiste, par une innovation vraiment moderne, a introduit le panorama dans le tableau d’histoire.’ Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 15. Lord Hertford to Vernet, letter of 8 April 1855, Horace Vernet dossier, National Gallery Library, London.

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under the Second Empire. As we shall see in this section, the ideological connotations that Vernet’s art carried were likewise consonant with the Second Empire’s populist agenda: the immense mass appeal of Vernet’s art, the notions of patriotism which his œuvre carried, the Napoleonic subjects as well as the positivist approach embodied in Vernet’s art were all tropes exploited by Napoleon III to maintain his popular power base.191 Lastly, Vernet’s fame gave the young regime an imprimatur of continuity and visibility. As a chronicler of French victories, Vernet was regarded by critics as France’s most patriotic artist. Painting military subjects to commemorate the deeds of Frenchmen had traditionally, and obviously, been seen as an act of patriotism. Claude Vignon saw in Vernet ‘an essentially French painter’, whose visual language was even considered to embody Frenchness.192 Viewed negatively, the patriotic connotations of Vernet’s art implied that his success was merely a matter of having been in the right place, at the right time. Louis Enault elaborated this notion in 1855, noting: One of the greatest merits of M. Horace Vernet is to have been born in France. People with spirit should always choose their fatherland. M. Vernet would not have obtained a quarter of his success in a less military country.193 Baudelaire, possibly Vernet’s fiercest critic, had even denied Vernet’s art the merit of ‘sincere’ patriotism in his famous review of 1846. Comparing Vernet’s paintings to ‘a kind of brisk and frequent masturbation in paint, a kind of itching on the French skin’, he equated them with Béranger’s patriotic songs that, in his opinion, had also not managed to ‘repay the people’s love’.194 As the Larousse Dictionary suggests, masturbation was regarded at the time as a ‘pathological disorder’ that could be cured by true love.195 According to Baudelaire, therefore, the patriotic love of the people found no artistic vehicle in Vernet’s art, which merely stayed on the surface like an itch. Baudelaire further presaged in 1846 that the dependency of Vernet’s art on historical circumstances meant that its ‘popularity will endure no longer than war itself, and will decline in proportion as the peoples of the world contrive other joys for themselves.196 191 192 193

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Baguley, 2000, 11. ‘peintre essentiellement français’, Vignon (Cadiot), 1855, 220; and About, 1855, 136. ‘Un des plus grands mérites de M. Horace Vernet c’est d’être né en France. Les gens d’esprit devraient toujours choisir leur patrie. M. Vernet n’aurait pas obtenu le quart de ses succès dans un pays moins militaire.’ Enault, 10 June 1855, 4. ‘ses tableaux ne sont point de la peinture, mais une masturbation agile et fréquente, une irritation de l’épiderme français; […] n’a récompensé le peuple de son amour’, Baudelaire, 1992, 129. Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 10, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1873), s. v. ‘masturbation.’ ‘(popularité) qui ne durera s’ailleurs pas plus longtemps que la guerre, et qui diminuera à mesure que les peuples se feront d’autres joies,’ Baudelaire in 1846, see Baudelaire, 1992, 129.

Vernet’s art in the service of the Second Empire

However, the retrospective of 1855 demonstrated that recent national glory conveyed in an accessible painting style could, for the time being, continue to cast a spell over the masses. The German art critic Ludwig Pietsch noted at the time that ‘since the end of the great art epoch at the end of the seventeenth century he (Vernet) has again let painting speak a language that can be understood by everyone’.197 It was this characteristic of Vernet’s art that led contemporaries as early as 1822 to parallel his work with Alexandre Dumas’ historical novels. By 1855 it had become common to compare the paintings’ richness of visual detail with the novels’ wealth of detailed descriptions, which enjoyed similar acclaim with ‘la foule’ in the mid-nineteenth century.198 In fact, there was a prevailing sentiment that, in its accessibility, unlike the œuvres of the other artists represented at the Universal Exhibition, Vernet’s art functioned like a mirror for the public. Writing for the Mercure Parisien, Labourieu commented: The Sunday public, the one who does not know what it should always say for its personal satisfaction, in front of a work by Ingres: – My God! How this is drawn! – that (same public) who does not know to say, for the same motive, in front of a work by Delacroix: – My God! How this is painted! – that (public) soon deserts the rooms of Ingres and Delacroix; it runs to the room of M. Horace Vernet, of that artist whom it loves, whom it admires naïvely because in his canvas, less erudite, less solemn, is its (the public’s) own mirror, where with each step the public recognises itself, admires itself and salutes itself.199 Just like a mirror, Vernet’s painting ref lected everyone who looked at it.200 The army naturally relished Vernet’s realistic renderings of battles, and the bourgeoisie – an emerging class the support of which Napoleon III sought to secure – f locked to it at every Salon; Lavergne admitted that even the fiercest critics could be found among the 197

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‘Seit dem Schluss der grossen Kunstepoche zu Ende des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts hat er (Vernet) zuerst die Malerei wieder eine Sprache reden lassen, die Alle verstehen.’ Ludwig Pietsch, Horace Vernet Album (Berlin, 1864), 1. Perrier, 17 June 1855, 85. ‘Mais le public du dimanche, celui-là qui ne sait pas qu’il faut toujours dire pour sa satisfaction personnelle, devant une œuvre de Ingres: ­– Grands Dieux! comme c’est dessiné! – celui-là qui ne sait pas dire, pour le même motif, devant une œuvre de Delacroix: – Grands Dieux! comme c’est peint! celui-là, déserte bientôt les salons de Ingres et de Delacroix; il court au salon de M. Horace Vernet, de cet artiste qu’il aime, qu’il admire naïvement parce que sa toile, moins savante, moins solennelle, est son propre miroir, où à chaque pas ce public se reconnaît, s’admire et se salue.’ Th. Labourieu, ‘Les peintures des beaux-arts’, Le Mercure parisien no. 9 (25 September 1855), 7. ‘As in Béranger’s songs, here the nation saw itself in clearest mirror, its victories and triumphs.’ (Wie in Bérangers Gesängen sah hier die Nation sich selbst, ihre Siege und Triumphe im reinsten Spiegel.) Pietsch, 1864, 1.

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crowds in Vernet’s room, admiring his artworks.201 Loudun simply noted: ‘M. H. Vernet has the masses for himself.’202 Vernet’s space further catered to the appetite for entertainment characteristic of the Second Empire’s rising mass consumer culture, as discussed in the previous section. Though photographs of the installation of Ingres’ space survive, there are none of Vernet’s, so we cannot know exactly how the paintings were displayed. According to contemporary accounts, however, the twenty-two paintings were crammed into a space that seemed too small.203 As the accounts suggest, this heightened the thrilling effect of Vernet’s battle paintings and catered to the growing appetite for sensation of his audiences. This appeal could not have been more fitting for the Second Empire, which – more than any previous regime – fostered populism; Vernet’s military paintings appealed to a collective psychology that claimed to overcome divisions of class and ideology and were thus topical in 1855 when the government was seeking to maintain its massive power base of popular support first indicated by the elections of 1848. Just as Napoleon III’s politics sought to cut through class divisions, Vernet’s art appealed to a broad public unlike any other œuvre at the Universal Exhibition, as Louis Enault noted: ‘Neither Ingres, nor Decamps, nor Delacroix will ever have this tumultuous popularity which puts one name into a hundred thousand mouths.’204 The artist’s fame that came with his popularity was the most obvious characteristic of Vernet’s œuvre that could be exploited by the young government. His art was admired by international collectors and critics and therefore suited the international scope of the Universal Exhibition. Edmond About noted: ‘Outside of Paris, nobody knows either M. Ingres, or M. Delacroix […]; M. Horace Vernet is admired as far as in the Ardèche.’205 Vernet’s innovative work further embodied the difficult balancing act that the government had to perform as it sought to, in David Baguley’s words, ‘evoke […] both the glories of the past and remain in tune with the modern age’.206 One of the dicta of the Universal Exhibition, eclecticism, is encapsulated in Vernet’s compromise between

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Lavergne, 1855, 71. ‘M. H. Vernet a pour lui les masses.’ Loudun, 1855, 123. See, for example, Calonne, 15 September 1855, 132. ‘Ni Ingres, ni Decamps, ni Delacroix n’auront jamais cette popularité tumultueuse qui met un nom dans cent mille bouches.’ Enault, 10 June 1855, 4. Pietsch emphasised that the negative feedback to Vernet’s art only came from 'a small group of frustrated academic critics […] remained ineffective in the face of the general enthusiasm of the public.’ (Die Erbitterung einer kleinen Fraction akademischer Kritiker […] blieb völlig macht- und wirkungslos dem ganz allgemeinen Enthusiasmus des Publikums gegenüber.) Pietsch, 1864, 10. ‘Hors de Paris, on ne connait ni M. Ingres, ni M. Delacroix […]; M. Horace Vernet est admiré jusque dans l’Ardèche.’ About, 1855, 135. Baguley, 2000, 150.

Vernet’s art in the service of the Second Empire

extreme artistic camps, as we have seen earlier in the discussion of his role as a juste-milieu artist. Contemporaries in 1855 did indeed refer to his art not as ‘juste-milieu’ but as ‘eclectic’: Claude Vignon enumerated Vernet among ‘les éclectiques’ in her book and explained that she considered as eclectic artists those who ‘unite at the same time qualities of several schools, seeking success in the union of the various manifestations of art’.207 The notion of progress was also inherent in the works by Vernet, who rejected the idealising of art-historical models in favour of a more topical representation of history that suited contemporary tastes. Vernet’s positivist attitude, as outlined in his 1848 lecture before the Academy, found its purest expression in the ceiling in the Palais Bourbon, which the artist painted between 1838 and 1847 for Louis Philippe and which introduced modern subjects such as steam engines into monumental public painting.208 Vernet’s art continued, from as early as 1824, to be perceived as ‘of its time’ and was thus in tune with the Second Empire, which fashioned itself as progressive. The qualities of Vernet’s œuvre, as discussed above, had also led the Second Empire arts administration to give the artist new commissions, despite the artistic and popular failure of the Second Republic’s commission Siège de Rome. In 1854, the artist had been sent to the Crimea to commemorate the French battles, and before the Universal Exhibition opened its doors, on 14 March 1855, he was asked to paint the subject of ‘Napoleon I Surrounded by Marshals and Generals Dead on the Field of Battle’. This was his first commission by the Second Empire, which was willing to spend 50,000 francs, a higher figure than any future commission by the arts administration, on the painting that was supposed to measure 9.48 by 5.06 metres.209 None of these commissions, however, were ultimately executed for the state. Napoléon Ier entouré des maréchaux et généraux morts sur le champ de bataille was never finished, and the Crimean battle paintings, as will be discussed in the next chapter, passed to private commissioners. Vernet had annulled these commissions himself, having been enraged by the fact that Ingres was the (sole) recipient of the Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur in 1855.210 His decision to reject the prestigious commission of commemorating the emperor’s famous uncle and, with it, the role of the chronicler of the First Empire that the government seems to have

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‘réunissent à la fois les qualités de plusieurs écoles, ou qui cherchent la réussite dans l’union des diverses manifestations de l’art’, Vignon (Cadiot), 1855, 213. Marie-Camille de G. also classified Vernet and Delaroche among the eclectic artists; see Marie-Camille de G., ‘Fine Arts: Salon of 1834’, in Art in Theory, 1815–1900, eds. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 157. Robert N. Beetem, ‘Horace Vernet’s Mural in the Palais Bourbon: Contemporary Imagery, Modern Technology, and Classical Allegory during the July Monarchy’, The Art Bulletin 66 ( June 1984), 254–269. On Vernet’s commission for Napoléon Ier entouré des maréchaux et généraux morts sur le champ de bataille, see Archives nationales F21/111 dossier Horace Vernet; Renaudeau, 2000, 112; Mainardi, 1987, 56. Mainardi, 1987, 113.

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envisaged for him, suggests that it was Vernet himself who stopped short of becoming the officially employed artist that he had been under the previous regime. When his last major battle painting, Bataille de l’Alma, was exhibited at the Salon of 1857, Vernet’s visual devices to achieve the impression of historical accuracy could no longer convince.211 Now aged sixty-seven, Vernet was still very conscious of publicity and, after having courted Théophile Silvestre while the latter was writing a book on the artist – Histoire des artistes vivants, études d’après nature: Horace Vernet (Paris, 1857) – he subsequently sued the author for having continued the tradition of attacking the artist for his production of ‘non-art’.212 This move could be interpreted as the aging artist’s effort finally to defend himself judicially against the harsh criticism which he had had to endure throughout his artistic career. Despite the fate that befell Vernet’s Second Empire commissions, his œuvre as a whole continued to inspire artists and remained the benchmark for critics discussing battle paintings in the Second Empire. And despite Vernet’s retreat from official commissions, Napoleon  III named him Grand Officier du Légion d’Honneur when he was on his deathbed on 5 December 1862, finally granting him the title he had hoped to receive in 1855.213 The Universal Exhibition of 1867, four years after Vernet’s death, would finally mark the high point of Vernet’s reputation, when critics dismissed any military paintings actually produced during the Second Empire, elevating Vernet as the only serious French military painter of the mid-nineteenth century. Vernet’s official benediction at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 was confirmed when the awards jury singled him out together with four other French artists for the Grand Médaille d’Honneur, the first prize.214 Acting according to the government’s intentions, the decision to award Ingres, Delacroix, Meissonier, Vernet and Decamps only set the seal on what had already been decided by giving these artists individual retrospectives.215 That Vernet was primarily chosen because of his popular appeal is affirmed by the jury’s decision to move the crowd-puller La Smala to the Palais de 211 212

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Alphonse de Calonne, ‘Exposition des beaux-arts de 1857’, Revue contemporaine 32 (1 July 1857), 597. On the dispute, see Théophile Silvestre, À Messieurs de la Cour Impériale de Paris. Première Chambre. Audience de mardi, 7 juillet 1857. Mémoire de Théophile Silvestre contre Horace Vernet (Paris: Imprimerie de Pillet Fils Aîné, 1857); and Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Théophile Silvestre’s “Histoire des artistes vivants”: Art Criticism and Photography’, The Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (December 2006), 729–755. Renaudeau, 2000, 93. Ingres had received the Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur in 1855 as reconciliation after he had threatened to boycott the award ceremony of the Universal Exhibition when he learned that he was not the sole recipient of the Grand Médaille d’Honneur. See Shelton, 2005, 238; Mainardi, 1987, 112–113. The winners of the Grand Médaille d’Honneur were Horace Vernet, Ingres, Decamps, Cornelius (Prussia), Landseer (England), Leys (Belgium), Heim, Delacroix and Meissonier; announced in Anonymous, ‘Mouvement des arts’, L’Artiste 16 (11 November 1855), 152. Mainardi, 1987, 111.

Vernet’s art in the service of the Second Empire

l’Industrie where it was hung next to the principal paintings by the other award winners.216 The close proximity to works of art that were celebrated as history paintings showed that Vernet’s La Smala had lost its overwhelming effect in an artistic context. The contrast between the styles of Ingres, Delacroix and Vernet, already highlighted by the proximity of their retrospectives, came into sharp focus: Mantz described the different impression that Vernet’s La Smala made now that it hung literally next to Delacroix’s and Ingres’ paintings: ‘poor little Smala, defended neither by the energy of the colours nor the audacity of its lines, was disappearing, vanquished, annihilated, withdrawn’.217 These supposed artistic shortcomings in the treatment of history painting did not matter, however, in the face of Vernet’s extraordinary popular appeal, and the painter who had started his career as an oppositional artist and whom Loudun called ‘the painter of the July Monarchy, of a certain epoch’ became at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 the painter of the Second Empire.218 While Vernet could challenge the relationship between the spectacular, the serious and the entertaining in paint, it was harder for Napoleon III to negotiate these tensions. In 1855, the clamour of the exhibition also temporarily served to muff le the contradiction between Napoleon  III’s peace intentions and the fact that France was involved in the Crimean War, a multinational war that dominated the mid-nineteenth century and killed at least 800,000 men. However, the closing speech at the Universal Exhibition already announced that Napoleon III would not be able to rise above the contradictions between fostering a leisure society and demonstrating military prowess: Gentlemen, the Universal Exhibition that is about to close offers the world a grand spectacle. It is during this serious war that men from all points of the universe have come to Paris to exhibit their works, the most distinguished men of the sciences, the arts and industry […]. Only peace, in fact, can continually

216

217 218

We know this thanks to an account by Paul Mantz: ‘After the Universal Exhibition, of 1855, one exhibited during several days, in the immense nave of the Palais des ChampsElysées, the paintings which have brought their authors awards of the first class. Smalah was placed next to Entrée des Croisés, by Delacroix, and Saint Symphorien, by Ingres.’ (A la suite de l’Exposition universelle, de 1855, on exposa pendant quelques jours, dans l’immense nef du palais des Champs-Elysées, les tableaux qui avaient mérité à leurs auteurs des récompenses de première classe. La Smalah, fut placée auprès de l’Entrée des Croisés, de Delacroix, et du Saint Symphorien, de M. Ingres.) Mantz, 22 November 1857, 182. Mainardi, in contrast, maintains that La Smala was ‘unceremoniously moved to a less desirable location during the show’, based on a reference I was not able to find: Paul Leroi, ‘Le Musée de la Bibliothèque royale de Belgique’, L’Art 59, no. 4 (1893–1900), 905; see Mainardi, 1987, 65, footnote 16. ‘la pauvre petite Smala, qui n’était défendue ni par l’énergie de sa coloration, ni par l’aplomb de ses lignes, disparaissait, vaincue, anéantie, supprimée’, Mantz, 22 November 1857, 182. Cited in footnote 74.

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develop these remarkable products of human intelligence […]. In the epoch of civilisation in which we live, the successes of armies, no matter how brilliant, are only f leeting.219 In the attempt to reconcile war and pleasure, the Second Empire would rely on the emergent spectacle culture: both panoramas and military paintings continued to be employed by the Second Empire. Whereas Vernet retired from major commissions, Langlois would be commissioned to produce panoramas of the two major wars to come: the Crimean War and the Italian Campaign. These two wars also gave rise to the next generation of military painters, headed by Adolphe Yvon, Alexandre Protais and Isidore Pils. With Vernet’s retrospective in 1855 giving his œuvre an unprecedented visibility, it became clear that the artist had founded a school, as he had, with paintings like La Smala, ‘modernised’ the genre of battle painting. Loudun noticed that ‘almost all of the (battle) painters have adopted Vernet’s manner: battles with isolated episodes are abandoned’.220 Adolphe Yvon, in particular, would reference the creator of ‘batailles en panoramas’ when he devised his giant propaganda piece to commemorate the French deeds that were taking place in the Crimea shortly before the Universal Exhibition closed.221 If Vernet’s La Smala had been a gigantic comic strip, Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff was a ‘Wimmelbild’, extending the bundled centres of military action towards the upper margin of the canvas and seemingly collapsing them into the viewers’ space.222

219

220

221 222

‘Messieurs, L’Exposition qui va finir offre au monde un grand spectacle. C’est pendant une guerre sérieuse que de tous les points de l’univers sont accourus à Paris, pour y exposer leurs travaux, les hommes les plus distingués de la science, des arts et de l’industrie […]. La paix seule, en effet, peut développer encore ces remarquables produits de l’intelligence humaine […]. A l’époque de civilisation où nous sommes, les succès des armées, quelque brillants qu’ils soient, ne sont que passagers.’ Closing speech by Napoleon III, 15 November 1855, in Prince Napoleon, 1857, 408–409. ‘presque tout les peintres ont adopté la manière de M. Horace Vernet: les batailles à épisodes isolés sont abandonnées’, Loudun, 1855, 126. Loudun means one episode per painting in this context. Calonne also wrote in 1855 that Vernet had established a school: ‘M. Horace Vernet is a maître […] he formed a school, he created a genre, he has numerous imitators and convinced enthusiasts.’ (M. Horace Vernet est un maître […] il a fait école, il a créé un genre, il a des imitateurs nombreux et des enthousiastes convaincus.) Calonne, 15 September 1855, 132. Calonne, 15 September 1855, 132. Vandenbrouck notes that La Smala can be read like a comic strip. Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, 2009, 113. To express the satiety of visual stimuli, I suggest the German expression ‘Wimmelbild’, an illustration for children where dozens of figures and actions challenge the reader to find a certain character, such as Martin Handford’s Where’s Wally? books, first published in 1987.

Vernet’s art in the service of the Second Empire

To conclude this chapter about the dazzling Universal Exhibition, panoramas and Vernet’s spectacular La Smala, I cite the art critic Léon Laurent-Pichat. Looking back in 1861 at the impetus of Vernet’s innovations, he noted: ‘One provided him with expanses of wall, and he brushed on it battles for the entertainment of his contemporaries […]. The people of Paris, the people of France need to be entertained.’223

223

‘On lui (Vernet) a livré des pans de murailles et il y a brossé des batailles pour l’amusement de ses contemporains. […] Le peuple de Paris, le peuple de France a besoin d’être amusé.’ Laurent-Pichat, 1861, 2.

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The arts, in our country of France, want to be taken seriously. Whereas shortsighted politics pretend to consider them as no more than a sort of sumptuous and costly superf luity, the statesman discovers in them the most energetic area of responsibility and the most appropriate to act on the opinions of men who are passionate about them, one of the elements the most essential to the life of a nation, of which they manifest the intelligence and realise the grandeur.1 (Mercey, 1855) With these words, the director of the arts section of the Ministry of State, Frédéric de Mercey (1805–1860), left his readers in no doubt about his understanding of art as an instrument of political power. The arts had, of course, been exploited as propaganda by previous regimes, but this explicit objective of using them to ‘act on the opinions of men’ would have far-reaching consequences for the artistic production under the Second Empire. The closely monitored art production and commissioning strategies under the Second Empire in general have been the subject of studies by Patricia Mainardi, Albert Boime and Catherine Granger.2 My focus in this section is on how the genre of military paintings in particular emerged out of state commissioning in this period. In 1

2

‘Les arts, dans notre pays de France, veulent être pris au sérieux. Tandis que des politiques à courte vue affectent de ne les considérer que comme une sorte de brillante et onéreuse superfluidité, l’homme d’État découvre en eux un des ressorts les plus énergiques et les plus propres à agir sur l’opinion des hommes qu’ils passionnent, un des éléments les plus essentiels à la vie d’une nation, dont ils manifestent l’intelligence et constatent la grandeur.’ Frédéric de Mercey, Études sur les beaux-arts: Depuis leur origine jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 2 (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1855), 415. Catherine Granger, L’Empereur et les arts: La liste civile de Napoléon III (Paris: École des Chartes, 2005). On the Second Empire government’s measures and agendas to influence the production and style of the arts in general, see Albert Boime, Art in the Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871, vol. 4, A Social History of Modern Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 591–601. For a more general account on the institutional world of official art in relation to the Universal Exhibitions and Salons held under the Second Em-

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order to outline the Empire’s arts policy in regard to military paintings, the most closely monitored genre, this short section looks at how and to what extent the government used tools such as the regulations for the Salons, medals, teaching programmes at the École des Beaux-Arts, and major commissions and acquisitions to implement the style of ‘official realism’. This style, first introduced by Horace Vernet, was the visual language chosen to convey political agendas and commemorate the regime’s supposed glory in civilian and military spheres. In the 1850s, in addition to Mercey, the main characters involved in the commissioning and acquisition process apart from the emperor were Achille Fould, the minister of state who signed off on the commissions, Nieuwerkerke, the general director of the imperial museums and, finally, Eudore Soulié, the curator at Versailles. These men employed a variety of strategies in their endeavour to foster a new generation of military artists – a Second Empire ‘brand’, so to speak. The image of the army conveyed during both the Second Republic and the early years of the Second Empire was unstable. The uncertain political climate made it difficult for the government to conceive the message it wished to convey through military paintings, and there was as yet no clearly defined arts policy for official paintings; commissioners and artists shifted between different, and at times contradictory, agendas. For the first Salon after the Revolution and the establishment of the Second Republic in early 1848, artists such as Isidore Pils had prepared revolutionary subjects that were soon outdated in the context of the rising political conservatism under the government of General Cavaignac. The regular army’s brutal crushing of the 1848 June insurrection was followed by continued counter-revolutionary repression. At the same time, the introduction of manhood suffrage pleased radicals, and Louis-Napoleon’s election on 10 December 1848 was initially welcomed by both left and right. The image of the army conveyed at the Salons of these early years remained ambiguous: both artists and commissioners avoided glorifying the army too overtly after the events of June 1848; at the same time, they evoked continuity with paintings of First Empire battles and military exploits in distant Algeria. The artists who would later become the official chroniclers of the Empire’s military deeds struggled to find subjects that would appeal to their potential patrons while safely adhering to established pictorial conventions. The first military paintings to be commissioned were Algerian battle paintings, which focused on the two battles fought under Louis-Napoleon’s reign thus far – the taking of the towns of Zaatcha (1849) and Langhouat (1852). Both events marked, as Jennifer Sessions points out, the ‘most horrific violence of the conquest period’, and the besieging, sacking and butchery of thousands of innocent inhabitants.3 This is not, however, ref lected in the standard visual language of the paintings, employed by the

3

pire, see Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 312.

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Fig. 12:  Jules Alfred Vincent Rigo, Aussaut et prise de Zaatcha, 1853, oil on canvas, 145 × 192 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

established military painters who received the commissions. Hippolyte Bellangé’s Prise de Zaatcha (Salon of 1850) and Jules Alfred Vincent Rigo’s painting of the same subject (Salon of 1853; Fig. 12) largely drew on a pre-existing iconography seeking to glorify the army.4 As Peter Miller has established, most officially commissioned Algerian battle 4

Bellangé (1800–1866) was a pupil of Gros and received various distinctions under the Restoration and July Monarchy for his military genre paintings that largely treated Napoleonic subjects. With the Crimean War, he started to paint contemporary military conflicts under the patronage of the Second Empire; in the 1860s, he focused on military genre scenes for private collectors. On Bellangé, see Émile Bellier de La Chavignerie and Louis Auvray, Dictionnaire général des artistes de l’école française depuis l’origine des arts du dessin jusqu’à nos jours: Architectes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et lithographes, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1882), s. v. ‘Bellangé’; and Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (Bayonne-Benech), ed. Günther Meissner, vol. 8 (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 1994), s. v. ‘Bellangé.’ Rigo (1810–1892) studied under Cogniet and exhibited military subjects from the Salon of 1836. Assaut et prise de Zaatcha for Versailles was his first major commission. Rigo became the chronicler of Napoleon III’s visits to areas of conflicts, even painting controversial military engagements such as the Mexican Campaign according to official wishes. On Rigo, see Émile Bellier de La Chavignerie and Louis Auvray, Dictionnaire général des artistes de l’école française depuis l’origine des arts du dessin jusquà nos jours: Architectes,

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paintings under Louis-Napoleon formally referenced the oeuvres of artists such as Louis François Lejeune and Horace Vernet.5 Rigo’s and Jean-Adolphe Beaucé’s paintings, with their Orientalist light, masses of realistically painted soldiers and hovering viewpoint, undeniably recall Lejeune’s and Vernet’s battle paintings.6 While the Algerian paintings went largely unnoticed by the critics, it is noteworthy that Louis-Napoleon, as president and emperor, seems to have taken an interest in their documentary nature. He acquired, for example, Bellangé’s painting of Zaatcha in 1850 and kept the painting in his official residence, the Palais de l’Elysée, before presenting it to Marshal Canrobert, who had been in command of one of the attacking columns at Zaatcha.7 Assaut et prise de Laghouat (Salon of 1853; Fig. 13) by Beaucé had prompted Napoleon III to commission the artist to paint the taking of Zaatcha for the Salon of 1857, and later for Versailles as well.8 While the Algerian paintings went largely unnoticed by the critics, it is noteworthy that Louis-Napoleon, as president and emperor, seems to have taken an interest in their documentary nature. He acquired, for example, Bellangé’s painting of Zaatcha in 1850 and kept the painting in his official residence, the Palais de l’Elysée, before presenting it to Marshal Canrobert, who had been in command of one of the attacking columns at Zaatcha.9 Assaut et prise de Laghouat (Salon of 1853; Fig. 13) by Jean-Adolphe Beaucé had prompted Napoleon  III to commission the artist to paint the taking of Zaatcha for the Salon of 1857, and later for Versailles as well.10 Neither in politics nor in art did the Algerian conquest have the same public visibility as it had had under the July Monarchy.11 Although paintings depicting the conquest continued to appear at most Salons throughout the Second Empire, the practice of making large-format paintings of Algerian conquests for Versailles, such as Vernet’s La Smala in 1845, was passé; the paintings were no longer hung in the central

  5

  6

  7   8   9 10 11

peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et lithographes, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1889), s. v. ‘Rigo.’ Peter Benson Miller, ‘La vision officielle de l’Algérie sous le règne de Napoléon III’, in De Delacroix à Renoir: l’Algérie des Peintres, exh. cat., Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2003), 155–158. Beaucé (1818–1875) studied under Bazin; from his first Salon contribution in 1839, he painted historical and contemporary battles and military genre scenes. With ‘Assaut et prise de Laghouat’, which was commissioned for Versailles, Beaucé became the official painter of the Second Empire’s military engagements, including the Crimean War, the Italian Campaign, Syria and Mexico. On Beaucé, see Bellier de La Chavignerie and Auvray, 1882, s. v. ‘Beaucé’; and AKL, 1994, s. v. ‘Beaucé.’ Granger, 2005, 472–473. Granger, 2005, 471–472. Jean-Adolphe Beaucé, Assaut de Zaatcha (Afrique), 26 nov. 1849, 1855, oil on canvas, 237 × 388 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Granger, 2005, 472–473. Granger, 2005, 471–472. Jean-Adolphe Beaucé, Assaut de Zaatcha (Afrique), 26 nov. 1849, 1855, oil on canvas, 237 × 388 cm, Châteaux de Vrsailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Miller, 2003, 155.

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Fig. 13:  Jean-Adolphe Beaucé, Assaut et prise de Laghouat, 1853, oil on canvas, 255 × 384 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

room of every Salon, nor were they discussed in detail by the critics. The Algerian Campaign was not a military success the new regime could claim entirely for itself but rather a legacy of the previous regime. Sessions points out that the Armée d’Afrique, seen as a ‘reincarnation of the Napoleonic armies’, transcended regime changes.12 Otherwise, the glorification of the army seemed inappropriate after the 1848 Revolution, and there was still no clear notion of what official paintings should convey. The failure, discussed in the previous chapter, of Vernet’s large-scale painting Siège de Rome (Salon of 1852), his first official commission under Louis-Napoleon, is symptomatic of this transitional period. In a routine gesture, the arts administration of the Second Republic employed the most famous military painter of the day to paint its first military engagement for Versailles. However, as Hornstein points out, the fact that Vernet’s original commission of three paintings was reduced to just one ref lects both the impossibility of glorifying the army after it had turned against the Parisians during the insurrections of 1848 and the public resentment of the painting’s subject matter, the Siege of Rome.13 The same French Second Republic, which was founded on the Revolution of 1848, had dispatched French troops to Rome in 1849 to overthrow the 12 13

Sessions, 2011, 136. Katie Hornstein, Episodes in Political Illusion: The Proliferation of War Imagery in France (1804– 1856) (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2010), 235–237.

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anticlerical Roman Republic. Restoring the papacy was a pretext for Louis-Napoleon to station troops in Italy in order to curtail Austrian inf luence.14 It also ensured the support of the French clergy and Catholic voters. The paradox, however, of a Republican France crushing a newly forming Roman Republic could not be overlooked.15 This intra-European military conf lict did not find broad support among the general public, and Vernet’s Siège de Rome, despite being hung on the long wall of the central room at the Salon of 1852, reportedly left critics and spectators ‘cold’.16 Vernet’s biographer linked the weak artistic qualities of the work directly to this uncertain phase of French politics when he noted: ‘It is without doubt less to old age than to these hesitations of the brush that one should attribute the inferiority of this work.’17 The abortive Siège de Rome commission prefigured the fate of most of Vernet’s later Second Empire commissions, which indicated that the artist’s visual language no longer suited either the political landscape or public taste. While both his fame and the patriotic and Napoleonic associations of his œuvre would justify its effective instrumentalisation at the Universal Exhibition of 1855, the negative reception of the Siège de Rome, as well as the fact that Vernet was the official painter of a previous regime, made the sixty-six-year-old unsuited to major new commissions, apart from portraits. At the Salon of 1857, the last at which he would be represented, he exhibited Bataille de l’Alma (eventually paid for by Prince Napoleon; Pl. 4), an equestrian portrait of Napoleon III, two portraits of Generals Canrobert and Bosquet (Fig. 45), both destined for Versailles, and a Zouave trappiste (1856).18 The latter genre scene, like his 1854 Messe en Kabylie (Fig. 6), was another example of the curious mixture of military and religious subjects in the artist’s late œuvre, depicting a priest of the religious order of the Trappists, active 14

15 16

17

18

Max Polonovski, ‘Le plan-relief des attaques de Rome en 1849, commémoration d’une étrange victoire’, in Napoléon III et l’Italie. Naissance d’une Nation. 1848–1870, exh. cat., Musée de l’Armée, Paris (Paris: Éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2011). Lynn Marshall Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 139. Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1852 (Troisième article): MM. Horace Vernet, Glaize, Tabar, Debon, Jaquand, Galabert’, La Presse (7 May 1852), 1–2; A.-J. Du Pays, ‘Beaux-Arts: Salon de 1852’, L’Illustration 19, no. 474 (27 March 1852), 202. ‘C’est sans doute moins à la vieillesse qu’à ces hésitations de pinceau qu’il faut attribuer l’infériorité de cet ouvrage’, Amédée Durande, Joseph, Carle et Horace Vernet: Correspondance et biographies (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1864), 305. Only from 1860, Vernet seems to have suffered from deteriorating eyesight. See Durande, 1864, 313. Both portraits were commissioned to Horace Vernet in 1856 by the Ministère d’État for 8,000 francs each. See Archives nationales F21/111 dossier 34 (Bosquet) and dossier 35 (Canrobert). Horace Vernet, Portrait en pied de S. Exe. M. le maréchal Canrobert, oil on canvas, 219 × 143 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. I have not been able to locate Vernet’s equestrian portrait of Napoleon III. A copy by Théodore Ghirardi is held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille: Portrait de Louis Napoléon Président à la revue, d’après Horace Vernet, 1853, oil on canvas, 322 × 269.5 cm. Horace Vernet, Le zouave trappiste, 1857, oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm, private collection.

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with the French army in Algeria, in a devoted kneeling pose, evoking the idea of the sacred mission in Algeria.19 The commissions for Versailles could be interpreted as a conciliatory gesture to Vernet to assuage his indignation in 1855 upon learning that Ingres, and not he, had been made a Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur. Théophile Silvestre, after having interviewed the artist, published Vernet’s discontent about this incident in his Histoire des artistes vivants, for which Vernet sued him, demonstrating that he was fighting for his reputation and conscious of publicity.20 The most prestigious commissions to commemorate the Crimean War would eventually be given to younger artists.21 As a tribute to General Mac-Mahon, the mayor of Autun had paid for a painting of the 1855 taking of the Malakoff Tower in the Crimea (Fig. 37); Vernet finished this in 1858, but it was not exhibited at the Salon. Vernet’s last official commission was to paint a portrait of Mac-Mahon for Versailles in 1860.22 Throughout his career, the artist had routinely reaped negative criticism for his novel treatment of contemporary history, but the various governments had favoured him for the public sentiment his works managed to inspire. Now this response was no longer forthcoming, and his artistic abdication made room for a new generation of military painters, leading Maxime Du Camp to note retrospectively in 1861 that ‘several men share today that heroic function that once belonged solely to M. Horace Vernet’.23 One of the figures to emerge in the politically unstable days of the Second Republic and to become a key military artist of the Second Empire was Isidore Pils.24 His painting La Marseillaise (Fig. 14) had been acquired by the Second Republic at the Salon of 1849, but soon fell victim to the complex politics of the time when it was removed from public sight by a wary Second Empire administration. Although the painting enjoyed an overwhelming popularity, the government did not allow it to be published in engravings until the press laws were relaxed in 1861. Chantal Georgel, in 19

20

21 22 23

24

See De Delacroix à Renoir: L’Algérie des Peintres, exh. cat., Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2003), cat. 76; Léon Lagrange, ‘Artistes contemporains: Horace Vernet (2e et dernier article)’, Gazette des beaux-arts 15 (1 November 1863), 464. Théophile Silvestre, À Messieurs de la Cour Impériale de Paris. Première Chambre. Audience de mardi, 7 juillet 1857. Mémoire de Théophile Silvestre contre Horace Vernet (Paris: Imprimerie de Pillet Fils Aîné, 1857), 9–10. Also discussed in Chapter I, 62. Paul Mantz published a retrospective article on Vernet in 1857, seeing his career as completed. See Paul Mantz, ‘Horace Vernet’, L’Artiste 2, no. 12 (22 November 1857), 177–182. Horace Vernet, Mac-Mahon, Duc de Magenta, 1860, oil on canvas, 215 × 140 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. ‘Plusieurs hommes se partagent aujourd’hui cette fonction héroïque qui autrefois appartenait en propre à M. Horace Vernet’, Maxime Du Camp, Le Salon de 1861 (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, A. Bourdilliat et Cie., 1861), 11. Pils (1815–1875) was a pupil of François-Edouard Picot (1786–1868). He won the Prix de Rome in 1838 and a Second Class medal at the Salon of 1846 with religious paintings. With the advent of the Second Empire, he specialised in military paintings. On Pils, see Bellier de La Chavignerie and Auvray, 1889, vol. 2, 275–276.

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Fig. 14:  Isidore Pils, Rouget de Lisle chantant pour la première fois la Marseillaise chez Diétrick, maire à Strasbourg, 1849, oil on canvas, 72 × 92 cm, Musée Ingres, Montauban.

her 1989 publication on the painting, suspects that the government deliberately suppressed this anthem of Republican France.25 The Marseillaise had come to be seen as the ‘hymn of the guillotine’ in the counter-revolutionary repression of the years after 1848.26 Shortly after the arts administration of the Second Republic had censored Pils’ Marseillaise painting, it commissioned Charles-Louis Muller to paint the dark side of the Revolution.27 Appel des dernières victimes de la Terreur shows the gloomy interior of a prison cell and focuses on the range of emotions of the prisoners who learn they will be 25

26 27

Chantal Georgel, Une icône républicaine: Rouget de Lisle chantant ‘La Marseillaise’ par Isidore Pils, 1849, exh. cat., Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989), 15. Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 438. Muller (1815–1892) was a pupil of Gros and Cogniet. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts at the age of sixteen. He covered a wide range of subjects, including genre scenes, religious, mythological and historical scenes, and portraits. For Vive l’Empereur!, displayed at the 1855 Universal Exhibition, he received a First Class medal and became one of the officially commissioned artists of the Second Empire. On Muller, see Bellier de La Chavignerie and Auvray, 1889, vol. 2, 141–142. The connection between the suppression of Pils’ painting and the commissioning of Muller’s is suggested in Georgel, 1989, 10.

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Fig. 15: Isidore Pils, Soldats distribuant du pain aux indigents, 14 e de ligne; camp des Invalides, 1849, 1852, oil on canvas, 163 × 131 cm, Château de Fontainebleau.

sent to the guillotine.28 The painting was shown at the Salon of 1850–1851 and was accompanied by a long explanatory text in the Salon catalogue. Commemorating the ‘Terror’, it was an ‘anti-revolution’ picture, a notion confirmed by Maxime Du Camp who, when it was exhibited again in 1855, would explicitly remark on the painting’s ideological connection with the counter-revolutionary politics of the day: ‘L’Appel des dernières victimes de la terreur, already exhibited at the Salon of 1850–1851, was evidently a piece of f lattery addressed to the anti-republican reaction which consoled itself, by

28

Charles-Louis Muller, Appel des dernières victimes de la Terreur, 1850, oil on canvas, 235 × 335 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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using calumnies, for all the senseless fears that it had experienced in 1848.’29 The presence at the 1850–1851 Salon of Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier’s (1815–1891) brutal depiction of the Revolution of 1848 in Souvenir de guerre civile, with corpses littering a narrow street, has been interpreted along similar lines, as an image of deterrence.30 The journal L’Artiste commented on the cautious arts policy of the Second Republic when it wrote in 1849: ‘Under the Republic, one does not buy or encourage paintings which represent armed insurrection.’31 Military prowess was conspicuously absent from paintings under the early Second Empire.32 For example, Pils’ Soldats distribuant du pain aux indigents (Fig. 15), exhibited at the first Salon of the new regime in 1852, depicts soldiers distributing bread to the poor. After the violent coup d’état during which the army had shot at civilian passers-by, a painting like this was evidently intended to reconcile the public with the army.33 It was also in line with Louis-Napoléon’s promotion of aid for the poor through charity, first outlined in his publication Extinction du paupérisme (1844). The Goncourt brothers picked up on the irony of showing these brutal soldiers, pointing out their ‘restrained and inhibited emotions’, in a painting of ‘military charity’.34 Pils’ two contradictory Salon contributions – the revolutionary Marseillaise painting of 1849 and the illustration of the army’s charity of 1852 – reveal how artists were testing the ground in order to please their potential future patrons. As Georgel points out, the artist was still too young and unknown in 1849 to be able to afford his own political agenda.35 In general, the official artists working under the Second Republic

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32 33 34 35

‘L’Appel des dernières victimes de la terreur, exposé déjà au Salon de 1850-51, fut évidemment une flatterie à l’adresse de la réaction antirépublicaine qui se consolait, à force de calomnies, de toutes les peurs insensées qu’elle avait subies en 1848.’ Maxime Du Camp, Les beaux-arts à l’exposition universelle de 1855. Peinture – sculpture (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1855), 200. Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, Souvenir de guerre civile, 1850, oil on canvas, 29 × 22 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Both Timothy Clark and Linda Nochlin have interpreted Meissonier’s neutral sangfroid viewpoint in displaying the corpses as indicative of his animosity towards the insurgents. See Timothy James Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 24–29; Linda Nochlin, ‘Picasso’s Color: Schemes and Gambits’, Art in America 68 (December 1980), 114. The painting’s original title was ‘Juin’ when it was rejected by the Salon jury of 1849; it was then accepted by the Salon jury of 1850–1851 with the new title. See Albert Boime, ‘Le réalisme officiel du Second Empire’, in Exigences de réalisme dans la peinture française entre 1830 et 1870, exh. cat., Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres (Chartres: Scop Presse normande, 1984), 120–121. ‘Sous la République, on n’achète pas ou on n’encourage pas des tableaux qui représentent l’insurrection armée,’ Anonymous, ‘Récompenses nationales aux artistes après le Salon de 1849’, L’Artiste 3 (15 September 1849), 191. Exceptions were the paintings of Algerian battles. The reconciliatory message of Pils’ painting is noted in Boime, 1984, 117. ‘l’émotion contenue et refoulée’, ‘aumône militaire’, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Études d’art: Le Salon de 1852 – La peinture à l’exposition de 1855 (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1893), 117. Georgel, 1989, 17.

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Fig. 16:  Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Politesse des artistes qui tiennent à obtenir des commandes du gouvernement’, Revue comique du Salon de 1851 (Paris: Au bureau du journal ‘le Charivari,’ 1851), 3.

and early Second Empire were condemned by contemporary critics as opportunist. A caricature by Cham of 1851 shows an artist bowing deeply towards a government official standing in front of a sign that reads ‘Ouverture du musée’ (Fig. 16). The caption underneath the submissive artist explains: ‘The politeness of artists who are anxious to obtain commissions from the government.’ Military subjects that were considered unproblematic under Louis-Napoleon’s regime included First Empire battles. The Napoleonic government’s political agenda in commissioning paintings that reminded the public of the Bonapartist legend was obvious, as we have seen. During the first years of the Second Empire in particular, painting a First Empire battle was a safe option for any artist hoping to gain official recognition, and many artists who dedicated themselves to these subjects subsequently became the government’s favourites. Adolphe Yvon36 exhibited Le Premier Consul descendant le Grand-Saint-Bernard at the Salon of 1852 and achieved a breakthrough with Le maréchal Ney soutient l’arrière-garde de la grande armée; retraite de Russie (Fig. 17), which critics sim-

36

Yvon (1817–1893) studied under Delaroche. His first Salon contribution was not until 1841 and his first official recognition was a First Class medal at the Salon of 1848. Like the other artists who specialised in military subjects under the Second Empire, he had also covered a range of genres, including religious painting, portraiture and history painting. On Yvon, see Bellier de La Chavignerie and Auvray, 1889, vol. 2, 729–730.

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Fig. 17:  Adolphe Yvon, Le maréchal Ney soutient l’arrière-garde de la grande armée; retraite de Russie, 1855, oil on canvas, 600 × 900 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

ply referred to as Retraite de Russie, at the Universal Exhibition of 1855.37 According to his biographer, Henri Jouin, the artist had painted Retraite de Russie on his own initiative and successfully persuaded the government to buy it from him for Versailles.38 It was awarded a Second Class medal, and the artist was made Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Moreover, Retraite de Russie caught the attention of Napoleon III himself and thus laid the foundation for Yvon’s future career as an official military artist. The emperor reportedly told Yvon in an audience that the painting of his uncle’s humiliating retreat from Russia was ‘very nice, even though it treats a subject that is embarrassing for our armies’.39

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Retraite de Russie is currently rolled up and cannot be photographed. A copy by Yvon is held at Manchester Art Gallery, of 1856, oil on canvas, 179.8 × 301 cm. Yvon presented an oil sketch to the arts administration; see Henry Jouin, Adolphe Yvon: Discours prononcé le 13 septembre 1893 au nom de l’École des beaux-arts en la cérémonie des obsèques du maître précédé de pages extraites des souvenirs inédits du peintre (Paris: Bureaux de L’Artiste, 1893), 23. Napoleon  III consequently commissioned the painting officially; see Claire Constans, Musée national du château de Versailles: Catalogue des Peintures (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1980), cat. 4705. ‘Votre tableau de la Retraite de Russie […] est très beau; bien qu’il traite un sujet pénible pour nos armes.’ Jouin, 1893, 25.

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Critics in 1855 appreciated Yvon’s choice of the delicate subject of the 1812 retreat from Moscow, as it invited contemplation of the senselessness of war at a time when the French public was hoping for a speedy end to the Crimean War. Dead corpses in the foreground of the Retraite create a visual entry into this image of sheer desperation. A long, winding train of soldiers, women and children drag themselves through the bare Russian snowscape towards the high horizon at the left margin of the painting. The soldiers constituting the end of the train face the viewer, lifting their rif les to defend the f low of refugees from the approaching Russians. This, Maxime Du Camp noted, was an image that showed how God punishes violence. He praised this emerging artist who seemed to reject Vernet’s glamorous depictions of war: While M. Yvon has dedicated himself to showing us the war from its important side, meaning its terrible and repulsive side, M. Horace Vernet, during his long and lucrative career, always searched, on the contrary, to make us look at it through the lorgnette of Franconi, like a seductive and dashing thing; he paints the victories and never the defeats.40 The Retraite was, however, Yvon’s last painting of a defeat. Yvon was perceived as Vernet’s direct successor as soon as the government started employing him.41 In the period leading up to the Universal Exhibition of 1855, the administration tightened the regulations to allow the government to exercise more control over artistic production. This initiative was based on the principle outlined by the minister of the interior, Persigny, at the awards ceremony of the Salon of 1852: ‘If a government, which owes its origin and even its principle to the poetic sentiments of the masses, disdains the cult of the arts for the cult of material things, it will depreciate the very conditions of its existence and fail to recognise the genius of its country.’42 Achille Fould reiterated in a correspondence with Nieuwerkerke that ‘it is important for the good

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‘Si M. Yvon s’est attaché à nous montrer la guerre par son côté important, c’est-à-dire par son côté repoussant et terrible, M. Horace Vernet, dans sa longue et fructueuse carrière, a toujours cherché, au contraire, à nous la faire voir à travers la lorgnette de Franconi, comme une chose séduisante et fringante; il peint les victoires et jamais les défaites,’ Du Camp, 1855, 205. In 1889, Alexandre would remember Yvon as one of the celebrities of the museum in Versailles and as the artist who enjoyed a similar popularity with the public to Horace Vernet, Arsène Alexandre, Histoire de la peinture militaire en France (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1889), 272. ‘Si un gouvernement qui a son origine, son principe même dans le sentiment poétique des masses, dédaignait le culte des arts pour le culte de la matière, il manquerait lui-même aux conditions de son existence et méconnaîtrait le génie de son pays.’ Victor de Persigny, ‘Récompenses décernées à la suite de l’Exposition de 1852 en séance solennelle’, excerpt from Moniteur of 20 July 1852, cited in Explication des ouvrages de peinture ... exposés aux MenusPlaisirs le 15 mai 1853 (Paris: Vinchon, imprimeur des musées impériaux, 1853), 8.

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execution of the works that they be subjected to severe vigilance and high-minded manag­e­ment.’43 Nieuwerkerke, then director-general of museums, announced the most farreaching regulations at the awards ceremony of the Salon of 1852: the right to elect the Salon jury was to be reserved to the administration, with Nieuwerkerke himself as exofficio president, and the number of admitted works restricted to three per artist.44 This, and the earlier decision to hold Salons only biannually (which would be the case from 1850 until 1863, with the exception of 1853), drastically reduced the opportunities for artists to show their works in public.45 The medals would be exclusively awarded to young artists who were not academicians or members of the Légion d’Honneur (a decision reiterated in 1853 on the occasion of the introduction of the Médaille d’Honneur, which was awarded together with 4,000 francs46). The attempt to bypass the institutional framework of the art world is also ref lected in a stipulation of 1853 agreed between Nieuwerkerke and Achille Fould, giving artists who were not members of the Institute and those who had not previously received distinctions, medals or the grand prix de Rome the right to paint major commissions for the emperor’s palaces and the museums.47 This active involvement of the state in artistic affairs, Nieuwerkerke explained in 1852, should discourage any works that were ‘unworthy of being included in a grand competition opened by the state.’48 At the Universal Exhibition, staged to legitimise the young Empire before a world public, enough was at stake to bring the entire organisation and jury panel under government control and to ensure that those in charge were politically loyal, albeit inexperienced in the arts.49 The exhibition opened at a time when French support for the continuation of the Crimean War had reached a nadir.50 Despite its banner of peace, the exhibition consequently became a platform from which to address the current political situation and, specifically, to silence opponents of the war through celebration of the Crimean battles already won. The French troops had fought numerous battles during their siege of Sevastopol but, to date, the Battle of the Alma was the only unambiguous French victory in the Crimea, which explains why it was represented in 1855 43

44 45 46 47 48

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‘il importe à la bonne exécution de ces travaux qu’ils soient soumis à une vigilance sévère et à une direction élevée’, Ministère d’État et de la Maison de l’Empereur to the Directeur général des musées impériaux, Archives des musées nationaux X Salons / 1853. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 592. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 592. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 592. Ministère d’État et de la Maison de l’empereur to the Directeur général des musées impériaux, Archives des musées nationaux X Salons / 1853. ‘indignes de figurer dans un grand concours ouvert par l’État’, Nieuwerkerke, speech on 20 July 1852, Explication des ouvrages de peinture ... exposés aux Menus-Plaisirs le 15 mai 1853, 1853, 11. Mainardi, 1987, 33–38. Case, 1972, 32–33.

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by four artists: Eugène Lami, Gustave Doré and two pupils of Gros, Joseph Beaume and Hippolyte Bellangé.51 Bellangé, in particular, was a suitable choice to illustrate the Crimean War, as he was perceived as an important chronicler of the glories of the First Empire.52 At the Universal Exhibition of 1855, Pils made his debut as a painter of contemporary military history with Une Tranchée devant Sébastopol (Pl. 27), discussed at length in the next chapter. Depicting soldiers in a Crimean trench, this work came closest to showing the harsh realities in the Crimea. Pils was fortunate in having a teacher who had a powerful position in the organisation of the exhibition, which may have helped ensure the presence of his painting. Pils had been taught by the history painter FrançoisÉdouard Picot (1786–1868), a jury member and the master of a whole generation of military painters who would become famous under the Second Empire.53 The government only endorsed the critical painting by Pils after the exhibition had closed, and the war had turned out to be a French success, by using the budget from the liste civile to purchase a copy of Pils’ work for the emperor’s palace in Saint-Cloud.54 That the emperor saw the presence of military paintings at the Universal Exhibition as an important extension of his political agenda is confirmed by his active patronage in 1855. As the Salon catalogue indicated, he had commissioned Eugène Lami to paint the Battle of the Alma of 20 September 1854 (Pl. 6), to be hung at the Musée du Luxembourg at the close of the exhibition.55 Although the exhibition’s eclectic arts 51

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Beaume (1796–1885) entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1817 and made his first Salon contribution in 1819 with a religious painting, which was acquired by the Louvre. He subsequently exhibited at the Salon mainly paintings of French history, among them First Empire battles, and genre paintings. On Beaume, see Bellier de La Chavignerie and Auvray, 1882, s. v. ‘Beaume’; and AKL, 1994, s. v. ‘Beaume.’ Napoleon III had already acquired several of Bellangé’s works before 1855 for his palaces. See Granger, 2005, 211. Like Vernet, Picot was a pupil of Vincent; see Adolphe Siret, Dictionnaire historique et raisonné des peintres de toutes les écoles depuis l’origine de la peinture jusqu’à nos jours, vol.  2 (Brussels, Paris, Leipzig, London: Les principaux librairies, 1883), 151. On jury members in 1855, see Mainardi, 1987, 62–63. The ministre d’État, Achille Fould, who initiated the first discussions of the possibility of also holding a Universal Exhibition of Art, was furthermore an opponent of the Crimean War. See Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 154. Tranchée devant Sébastopol was acquired by the Société des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux for the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux in 1857. See painting file at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux. The acquisition of the copy was decided on 13 November 1855 for a sum of 6,000 francs and then placed in Saint-Cloud, where it was destroyed by fire. See Granger, 2005, 609. Lami (1800­–1890) studied under Horace Vernet and Gros; he entered the École des BeauxArts at seventeen and made his first Salon contribution with a contemporary battle painting commissioned for Versailles, Combat du Puerto de Miravete, le 30 septembre 1823, at the Salon of 1824. He subsequently excelled at various genres: contemporary battles, history painting with a focus on First Empire battles, portraits, genre paintings and paintings of court scenes

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section endorsed all directions in art by showing retrospectives of such diverse artists as Delacroix, Ingres and Vernet, the choice of subjects, artists and artistic styles treating contemporary history was closely monitored. The selectors adhered to an established visual language for glorifying battle paintings, of which Lami’s conventional composition of the Battle of the Alma – with the high command in the foreground, watching the battle unfolding in the background – is exemplary. Lami had depicted only historic battles before his commission to paint the Battle of the Alma and was therefore free of associations with the politics of former regimes. His training under the eminent battle painters Gros and Vernet must have further endowed him with sufficient expertise, in the opinion of his commissioners, to treat this delicate subject of contemporary history. Towards the end of the Universal Exhibition, the emperor specifically remarked on Bellangé’s rendering of the Battle of the Alma, leading the Ministry of State to acquire it from the ‘Encouragement’ budget for the large sum of 8,000 francs.56 In his speech to mark the closure of the Universal Exhibition in autumn 1855, Napoleon III emphasised the importance he attached to public opinion: ‘At our present stage of civilisation the success of armies, however brilliant, is only f leeting. In reality, it is public opinion alone that invariably wins the final victory.’57 It would be the opinion of the French public that would eventually decide whether the high price paid by the allies for their victory in the Crimea in September of that year was worthwhile. In fact, the ‘final’ victory was rather one that had to be won over the French public: the Crimean War had broken out only three years after Napoleon III’s promises of peace in his Bordeaux speech, and the consequent sufferings could not easily be erased from public consciousness. But the possibility that the retrospective representation of the war could regain the trust of a betrayed French republic meant that public opinion would also provide the impetus for future commissions of military paintings. Such commissions would attempt to reconcile, through the medium of painting, the simultaneous promotion of peace and military strength. The arts administration now started to outline its commissioning strategies concretely. That Achille Fould envisaged building a museum that, like the one in Versailles, would house paintings of contemporary history, can be gathered from a report

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under the July Monarchy and Second Empire. On Lami, see Bellier de La Chavignerie and Auvray, 1882, s. v. ‘Lami’; and Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (Lalix-Leibowitz), eds. Andreas Beyer, Bénédicte Savoy, and Wolf Tegethoff, vol. 83 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), s. v. ‘Lami.’ The painting was donated by the Ministère d’État and entered the collection of the Musée impérial de Versailles in 1856. See M. le comte de Nieuwerkerke, Les travaux de remaniement et d’accroissement réalisés depuis 1849 dans les musées impériaux suivi d’un relevé sommaire des objets d’art entrés dans les collections de 1849 à 1863 (Paris: Librairie académique Didier et Cie., 1863), 93. Le Moniteur universel (16 November 1855) and Débats, (16 November 1855), cited in Case, 1972, 40.

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that Mercey addressed to Fould in 1856. In it, Mercey acknowledged the subject of a new museum but left the question open, instead giving an overview of the commissioning situation and future plans.58 So far, the paintings of events under Louis-Napoleon’s short reign that had already been commissioned included Vernet’s Siège de Rome or, as Mercey called it, in a tellingly ignorant way, ‘Prise de Rome’, Beaucé’s Laghouat (Fig. 13) and Zaatcha, Muller’s Installation des Grands Corps de l’État and Ange Tissier’s La mise en liberté d’Abd-el-Kader. Mercey reminded Fould: ‘You have, furthermore, charged several artists to study on-site the localities illustrated by the glorious and recent heroic deeds. It is thus M. Yvon who has been sent to Sevastopol and M. Beaucé to Africa.’59 Arguing that ‘not many years have gone by since the emperor Napoleon III was called to govern France, first as president, then as emperor, and this short period has been distinguished by many memorable deeds and glorious events’, Mercey noted that many more commissions had been awarded to record these deeds, which he divided into civil and military subject matters. Civil subject matters would include paintings of the emperor’s state visits, seminal events in his reign such as the proclamation of the Empire, and the distribution of awards after the Universal Exhibition.60 Military subjects thus far, Mercey noted, comprised the Siege of Rome and the Algerian conquest – which he considered to have been sufficiently covered already – and the Crimean War. While it is likely that Napoleon III himself had the idea for an entire room in Versailles dedicated to the Crimean War, Mercey seems to have been the first to articulate the plan on paper.61 In the same report dating to shortly before or in 1856, the year in which the peace treaty was signed, Mercey claimed: ‘A room of vast dimension 58

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Frédéric de Mercey to Achille Fould in 1856, Archives nationales F21/487. For interpretations of the report, also see Boime, 1984, 106; and Institut du monde arabe, De Delacroix à Renoir: l’Algérie des Peintres, 2003, 154; and Annie Bardon, Militärmalerei im Second Empire am Beispiel des Krimkrieges (PhD thesis, Universität Marburg, 1980), 246–248. ‘Vous avez, en outre, chargé plusieurs artistes d’étudier sur place, les localités illustrées par de glorieux et récents faits d’armes. C’est ainsi que M. Yvon a été envoyé à Sébastopol et M. Beaucé en Afrique.’ Frédéric de Mercey to Achille Fould in 1856, Archives nationales F21/487. On the category of civil subjects and representations of Napoleon III in official commissions, see Ashley Robertson Givens, From the Archetypal to the Intimate: Official Representations of Napoléon III, 1850–1866 (PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2012). I am indebted to Frédéric Lacaille, conservateur en chef en charge des peintures du XIXe siècle, des prêts aux expositions et des dépôts in Versailles, for the suggestion that the room may have been Napoleon III’s idea and for many invaluable leads concerning the Salle de Crimée. The room is mentioned in Bardon, 1980, 48; Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 601; and Granger, 2005, 352. An analysis focusing exclusively on the genesis, implementation, layout and fate of the Salle de Crimée can be found in the author’s article Julia Thoma, ‘Panorama of War: The “Salle de Crimée” in Versailles’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 1 (Spring 2016), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring16/thoma-on-panorama-of-warsalle-de-crimee-versailles, accessed on 1 February 2017.

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has to be dedicated solely to the Crimean War.’62 The Crimean paintings would continue the previously mentioned project of illustrating national history begun by LouisPhilippe, who had commissioned three large rooms that formed an enfilade in the north wing of Versailles and commemorated the events of the African Campaign fought between 1830 and 1848. This major July Monarchy project was the prototype that Mercey must have had in mind when he suggested the creation of a room dedicated to the Crimean War. But the projects differed in their genesis and outcome. Whereas Louis-Philippe had planned the three rooms in close collaboration with his favorite artist, Vernet, Napoleon III was not as directly involved in the project in Versailles. The so-called Salle de Crimée would instead be a team effort by several artists, commissioned by different government officials. In his 1856 report, Mercey proposed that the room contain four ‘grand compositions’ representing four major events of the Crimean War: the landing of the troops; two battles (Alma and Inkerman); and the attack on the last Russian stronghold, the Malakoff Tower, and Sevastopol’s capture (he counted the latter two subjects as one composition). These four paintings were to each occupy one wall of the room and to be connected by ten representations of ‘secondary events’, which he also listed. As if this were not enough, he advocated the commissioning of two more paintings of other events related to the Crimean War, to be hung in an annex attached to the main Crimean room. A painting of the return of the French troops to Paris should, Mercey proclaimed, ‘complete the series of these glorious events’.63 The report finished with a list of the Crimean subjects and a rough calculation of costs (the annotations of the names of artists to be commissioned were probably added later, as they are in a different handwriting and in pencil). Mercey estimated 20,000 francs for each painting of ‘primary rank’ and 6,000 francs to 10,000 francs for the paintings of ‘secondary rank’.64 As was typical for official commissions under the Second Empire, the costs for the paintings destined for the Salle de Crimée were split between the two official organs responsible for art commissions: 65 the Direction des Beaux-arts and the Civil List (the funds accorded to the sovereign by the government).66 Over the following years, Eudore Soulié, the curator in Versailles, was the project coordinator for the venture.

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‘Une salle de vaste dimension devrait être consacrée à la seule guerre de Crimée.’ Frédéric de Mercey to Achille Fould in 1856, Archives nationales F21/487. ‘Un tableau représentant: La Rentrée de l’Armée d’Orient à Paris, complêterait la série de ces évènemens glorieux.’ Frédéric de Mercey to Achille Fould in 1856, Archives nationales F21/487. Which painting belonged to which category was not entirely clear yet; this, de Mercey noted, depended not only on the artist’s market value and the subject to be depicted but also on the placement and size of each canvas, which had not been determined, Frédéric de Mercey to Achille Fould in 1856, Archives nationales F21/487. Granger, 2005, 352. For a definition of the Civil List under the Second Empire, see Granger, 2005, 7.

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On 19 November 1856, he wrote to the general director of the imperial museums, Alfred-Émilien Comte de Nieuwerkerke, that Napoleon III and the minister of state, Achille Fould, had approved of the idea of a room dedicated to the Crimean War, for which was envisaged the former Salle de Maroc, left unfinished at Louis-Philippe’s abdication in 1848.67 According to Soulié, the emperor had also accepted the basic arrangement (‘les principales dispositions’) of the paintings. For decisions on the exact placement of the already existing paintings and on which subjects were still to be commissioned, Soulié was expecting a visit by Mercey, who, as the above-mentioned 1856 report suggests, seems to have been the originator of the project. In the same letter, Soulié invited Nieuwerkerke to attend this meeting, which gives us insight into the great number of parties involved in the creation of the Salle de Crimée. These included the emperor, the Ministère d’État represented by Achille Fould, the Direction des Beaux-arts under the aegis of Mercey, Nieuwerkerke as director of the imperial museums and finally Soulié, who was on-site as the curator in Versailles. From 1856 onwards, the protagonists started to draw together both existing paintings and new commissions to contribute to the venture.68 Among the paintings already existing in 1856 were three that had been exhibited at the Salon of 1855.69 But the bulk of the paintings destined for the Salle de Crimée were either not commissioned yet or at this point still under way, with thirty-three to be exhibited at the Salon of 1857. Among these were portraits of the leading generals in the Crimea as well as battle paintings by artists who were also military officers and worked for the Dépôt de la Guerre, whose contributions will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. The three most prestigious commissions – among the four subjects specified by de Mercey in his report: the Battles of the Alma and Inkerman and the capture of the Malakoff – were funded by the Direction des Beaux-arts and given to artists who did not have military careers and had focused on history painting before.70 Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was asked to paint the Battle of Inkerman, a commission that he hoped would mark ‘a seri-

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Letter from Soulié to Nieuwerkerke, 19 November 1856, Archives des musées nationaux V2/1855–1870. The former Salle de Maroc was referred to as room no. 102 in the museum guide of 1855. See Eudore Soulié, Notice des peintures et sculptures composant le Musée Impérial de Versailles. 1er et 2e étages (Versailles: Imprimerie de Montalant-Bougleux, 1855), 76–77. Granger, 2005, 351–352. A depiction of the Battle of the Alma by Joseph-Louis-Hippolyte Bellangé, a portrait of the late commander-in-chief Marshal Armand-Jacques Leroy de Saint-Arnaud by CharlesPhilippe Larivière and a painting entitled Les sœurs de charité en Crimée by Eugène Appert (Pl. 13). Explication des ouvrages de peinture ... exposés au Palais des Beaux-arts, Avenue Montaigne, le 15 mai 1855 (Paris: Vinchon, imprimeur des musées impériaux, 1855), 247, 253, 369. On the commissions being funded by the Direction des Beaux-arts, see Granger, 2005, 352.

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ous beginning’ of his ‘career as a painter’.71 His painting, not finished yet, was exhibited at the Salon of 1857 to great critical acclaim.72 Yvon and Pils were charged with the room’s other main works, the representations of the capture of the Malakoff and the Battle of the Alma.73 All three artists had only recently turned their attention to military subjects, probably lured by well-paid official commissions and prestigious decorations as well as the prospect of being immortalized in – as it was now called – the Musée Impérial de Versailles. The commissioners had concrete ideas about the preferred style of these military paintings. As Albert Boime has established, historical accuracy in paintings was especially welcome for official commissions.74 In the same letter of 1856 discussed above, Mercey outlined why a realist style would be preferable for official commissions: The artist, in fact, can, with the help of the means that he commands, imbue a (historical) fact with a character of reality that the (written or spoken) narrative cannot attain, and only peinture historique can conserve, in a precise and certain manner, the image of contemporary personalities; show them to us agitating; indicate to us the disposition of the locations, the exact form of the costumes; reproduce, in one word, the physiognomy of the epoch of which it retraces the events.75 The realisation that artists could employ a realist style to render recent history would soon become the government’s guiding principle for commissions. The notion of literally ‘writing’ history in paint had been introduced by Vernet who, in his Algerian paintings, as we have seen, arranged several episodes from the historical event to visualise a historical narrative. Gautier noted in 1851 that Vernet ‘writes with his paint-

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‘This painting, the subject and dimensions of which are very important, may be, in my opinion, a serious beginning of the career as a painter.’( Ce tableau dont le sujet et la dimension sont très-importants, peut être pour moi un début sérieux dans la carrière du peintre.) Letter from Gustave Doré, probably to Nieuwerkerke, who, in his role as general director of the museums, was the ex-officio president of the Salon jury. Doré to a ‘Monsieur,’ 8 May 1857, Archives des musées nationaux P30 dossier Doré; and Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 592. Discussed in detail in Chapter III, 135-139 . Discussed in detail throughout Chapter III. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 601. ‘L’artiste, en effet, peut à l’aide des moyens dont il dispose, donner au fait un caractère de réalité auquel le récit ne peut atteindre, et la peinture historique peut seule conserver d’une manière précise et certaine, l’image des personnages contemporains; nous les montrer agissant; nous indiquer la disposition des lieux, la forme exacte des costumes, reproduire, en un mot, la physionomie de lépoque dont elle retrace les évènements.’ Frédéric de Mercey, Rapport préparatoire aux commandes de 1856. Rapport à son excellence le ministre d’État, Archives nationales F21/487.

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brush more than he models’ and called his œuvre ‘stenographic’.76 A year later, the critic reiterated this thought, noting that Vernet ‘writes on canvas the bulletins of the modern grande armée’.77 That the abundance of detail in Vernet’s canvases was considered more of a literary than a painterly approach is confirmed by the comparisons drawn between the artist’s œuvre and Alexandre Dumas’ detail-rich historical novels mentioned in Chapter I. Like Vernet, the military painters commissioned by the government would arrange several episodes on large canvases instead of summarising the essence of a historical event in an ensemble. To conclude this point, the government’s wish for painters to ‘write’ history led it to promote an instructively realist style; what Albert Boime calls ‘réalisme officiel’ now became the prevalent aesthetic at the Salons of the Second Empire.78 With the end of the authoritarian period of the Second Empire in the 1860s, the active encouragement of this style ceased. To realise the commissions of Crimean battle paintings, the arts administration spared no (financial) effort. On the one hand, it commissioned artists who had been in the Crimea during the war with paintings for the Salle de Crimée, such as Henri DurandBrager, a captain, pictorial war journalist and pupil of the famous marine painter Théodore Gudin.79 Durand-Brager went to Sevastopol in 1853, even before France’s official declaration of war in 1854. There, he worked as a newspaper correspondent for La Patrie, the Monde illustré and L’Illustration, and his sketches of the theatre of war published in L’Illustration decisively contributed to the ways in which Parisians imagined the Crimea. For the Salle de Crimée, he produced a major cycle of twenty-one paintings showing the Crimean terrain and everyday skirmishes of the Siege of Sevastopol. Alexandre Protais also followed the French troops to the theatre of war and worked for L’Illustration.80 Although Protais’ unconventional views of combat in the open terrain 76 77 78 79

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‘Sa peinture est […] sténographique. Il écrit avec son pinceau plutôt qu’il ne modèle.’ Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1850–51’, La Presse (21 February 1851). ‘M. Horace Vernet rédige, sur toile, les bulletins de la grande armée moderne,’ Gautier, 7 May 1852. Boime, 1984, 100; Miller, 2003, 153. Durand-Brager (1814–1879) was already in the navy when he started studying under Gudin. He then went on to study under Eugène Isabey and had his Salon debut in 1843 with a historic naval battle. Throughout his artistic career he was mainly represented at the Salon with historic and contemporary naval battles on large formats that were state commissioned, views of harbours and other marine subjects. See Bellier de La Chavignerie and Auvray, 1882, s. v. ‘Durand-Brager’; and Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (Dunlop-Ebers), ed. Günther Meissner, vol. 31 (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2002), s. v. ‘Durand-Brager.’ On Durand-Brager’s activity as a journalist during the Crimean War see Ulrich Keller, ‘Schlachtenbilder, Bilderschlachten – Zur visuellen Kultur des Krimkrieges’, in Der Krimkrieg als erster europäischer Medienkrieg: Kultur und Technik, eds. Georg Maag and Wolfram Pyta, vol.  14 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010), 26–31; and Bardon, 1980, 82–86. Protais (1825–1890) studied under Auguste François Desmoulins and began his artistic career with paintings of the Crimean War. He continued with battle scenes of the Italian

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and in the trenches could not have been more different from Durand-Brager’s panoramic renderings, both artistic solutions would succeed in convincing the public of their value as authentic eyewitness reports, which was the government’s main aim.81 The paintings by Durand-Brager and Protais, as well as three paintings by Rigo, Edme Fontaine and Antoine Rivoulon, destined for the Salle de Crimée, were paid for by the Civil List, while the rest were funded by the Ministère d’État.82 On the other hand, after the war was over the arts administration sent Langlois and Yvon to make sketches of the battle sites. Langlois was commissioned to create a panorama of the taking of the Malakoff, and Yvon was asked to prepare the centrepiece of the Salle de Crimée: three paintings depicting the taking of the Malakoff from three different angles. The subject was an important part of post-war politics, as the vague ending to the Crimean War could only be interpreted as a French, as opposed to an allied, victory if the capture of the Malakoff Tower by the French troops was defined as the endpoint of the war. While Langlois was a long-established panorama painter, Yvon, never having painted a contemporary history subject before, was an unknown quantity, politically speaking. For the whole project, Mercey agreed to pay Yvon the large sum of 20,000 francs, in instalments of 5,000 francs, on the condition that the artist finished his Prise de la tour de Malakoff in time for the Salon of 1857.83 The Salon of 1857 was the platform where most of the major commissioned paintings of the Crimean War were first exhibited. The sheer number of military subjects – over one hundred including all media and military genre scenes – resulted in an overt celebration of military strength. Apart from the arts administration, the Dépôt de la Guerre played an active role as patron of Crimean War subjects exhibited in 1857. This was a historical archive of military documents in the Invalides, which commis-

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Campaign and military genre scenes until the end of his career, and was therefore a specialised military painter. He gained his first distinction at the Salon of 1863 with a Third Class medal and received further medals at the Salons of 1864 and 1865 as well as the title of Chévalier de la Légion d’Honneur. For a contemporary account on Protais, see Bellier de La Chavignerie and Auvray, 1889, s. v. ‘Protais.’ On Protais’ work for L’Illustration, see Bardon, 1980, 86. For an overview of Protais’ career under the Second Empire and Third Republic, see Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (Pretsch-Rauh), eds. Andreas Beyer, Bénédicte Savoy, and Wolf Tegethoff, vol. 97 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), s. v. ‘Protais.’ On Durand-Brager’s paintings and their relation to his activity as a journalist, see Hornstein, 2010, 277–280. Granger, 2005, 352. Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 52; Yvon would eventually even be paid 5,000 francs more than inititally agreed although his painting was only finished in mid-May 1857, when it was hung in the Salon d’Honneur during the time when the Salon closed for the traditional rehanging. Letter of the Ministère d’État to Adolphe Yvon, 24 July 1857, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 52; on the late installation at the Salon, see Jouin, 1893, 186.

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sioned watercolours of battles for purely documentary purposes.84 The meticulous overviews of the battlefields were supposed to reveal the strategies employed in battle and, like the major official commissions by the arts administration, were often accompanied by explanatory excerpts from the Moniteur universel. Already commissioned under the First Empire, this genre had not evolved notably since then but represented a way of rendering the Crimean War entirely differently from other paintings exhibited at the Salons.85 Apart from the Dépôt de la Guerre employees, Langlois and DurandBrager also occasionally executed works for the Dépôt. In contrast to the latter two, the permanent employees Théodore Jung (1803–1865) and Antoine Valentin Jumel de Noireterre (1824–1902) had never been to the Crimea and based their works on information from war correspondents.86 Napoleon III was eager to make his first contribution to the archive, which had been established in the seventeenth century, and, as the Salon catalogue of 1857 indicated, he donated the six works on display of battles fought during the Crimean War, drawn by Jumel de Noireterre, to the Dépôt de la Guerre.87 The drawings went unnoticed by art critics and, despite featuring in every Second Empire Salon after 1855, neither Jumel nor Jung appeared in any of the otherwise comprehensive artists’ dictionaries of the nineteenth century. Private commissioners also contributed military subjects to the Salon of 1857 and in fact to most of the Second Empire Salons. The Salon catalogue would indicate to whom these paintings belonged and comprised a major source of publicity for military staff. Prince Napoleon was so eager to figure at the Salon of 1857 in a painting by the famous military painter Vernet that he persuaded him to finish Bataille de l’Alma (Pl. 4), in which the prince is displayed in the foreground, in spite of the artist’s previous cancellation in January 1856.88 Prince Napoleon  furthermore paid for Pils’ Le débarquement de l’armée française en Crimée (Salon of 1857; Pl. 8), in which he also takes up a prominent position in the foreground. Throughout the Second Empire, the commissioned military paintings’ principal destination was indeed the Salon. Here, the political function that the commissioned paintings were intended to fulfil – their crucial role in post-war politics – unfolded while the targeted public sentiment was topical. The paintings’ afterlife, as Katie Hornstein has established, subsisted more in the form of prints and postcards than 84 85 86 87 88

Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 6, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1870), s. v. ‘Dépôt de la Guerre.’ Bardon, 1980, 41. Bardon, 1980, 88. Explication des ouvrages de peinture ... exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 15 juin 1857 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1857), 184. As discussed above, Vernet had cancelled the commission as the result of Prince Napoleon’s decision to award Ingres with the Grand Officer de la Légion d’Honneur. See letter by Vernet to Prince Napoleon, 19 January 1856, reprinted in Silvestre, 1857 (II), 9–10.

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in their actual presence in Versailles.89 Yvon’s capture of the Malakoff Tower, his painting of the emperor at Solferino and Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma are better known to art historians today from their presence in the files of the Louvre documentation than through their physical existence, as they are in storage or hidden behind temporary exhibition walls. In addition to the 1855 Universal Exhibition and the Salon of 1857, the Second Empire saw two more major ‘propaganda’ exhibitions where military paintings were abundantly present: the Salon of 1861, following the Italian Campaign, and the Universal Exhibition of 1867. The paintings exhibited mainly represented the Crimean and Italian Wars but were already at the time being perceived by contemporaries as ‘spectacular but slightly misled military fanfares’.90 In 1859, Nieuwerkerke and Soulié decided that there were enough paintings to begin the hang of the Salle de Crimée.91 As the paintings and the narrative established by the hang form the main subject of the next chapter, it is enough to mention at this point that the setup probably roughly followed the concept conceived by Mercey in 1856. Apart from the four ‘core’ subjects suggested by him, the paintings varied from his recommendations in regard to size, style and placement. Several subjects suggested in his 1856 report were never painted, and his idea of an ‘annex’ was never implemented.92 Using a draft of an intended installation drawn by Soulié in 1859, I reconstruct one phase of the plans for the Salle de Crimée in the next chapter. The room seems to have existed as planned in 1859 for only a couple of years before the installation of the large painting of the Battle of the Alma by Pils and the addition of the new commissions of the Italian Campaign (1859) resulted in a rehang and some Crimean paintings having to be moved into storage.93 Versailles was bursting at the seams, as an 1866 letter by Nieuwerkerke to Marshal Vaillant, a veteran who was now the ministre de la Maison de l’Empereur et des Beaux-Arts, reveals, as it addresses the shortage of space in 89 90

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Hornstein, 2010. ‘All the grand battle paintings that furnish the Salon carré, spectacular but slightly misled fanfares during our peace, cooled history of various struggles.’ (Tous les grands tableaux de bataille qui meublent le salon carré, fanfares éclatantes un peu fourvoyées dans notre paix, histoire déjà refroidie de luttes diverses.) C.-A. Dauban, Le Salon de 1863 (Paris: Renouard, 1863), 17. Soulié to Nieuwerke, letter of 28 September 1859, Archives des musées nationaux V2. For more details, see Chapter III, 144. For example, Mercey had suggested the commission of a painting of the embarkment of the French troops in Boulogne, which was never realised. Already by 1865, the original setup of the room had changed when Isidore Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma (Salon of 1861; Fig. 47), 500 × 900 cm, probably replaced the paintings on the north wall of the room. See Guide au musée impérial de Versailles (Versailles: Brunox, 1865), 67. Probably already by the end of the 1860s but definitely by 1881, the paintings of the Italian Campaign (1859) were also hung in the Salle de Crimée, and some Crimean War paintings were moved to storage. See Clément de Ris, Notice du Musée historique de Versailles. Supplément: Rez-de-chaussée, premier et deuxième étages, attique chimay (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, 1881), 37–42.

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Versailles: ‘It is unwise and of bad taste to let paintings disappear which represent the glorious deeds accomplished under past governments, in order to replace them with those that have to represent the splendours of the current regime.’94 This statement confirms once more that every step in the process of the commissions was political, including their hang. In the 1860s, the arts administration continued to change the regulations of the art world. One could argue that the famously unstable politics of Napoleon III found a direct parallel in these regulations. After the Salon regulations had been temporarily loosened in the 1850s, they were tightened from 1859, when the government controlled the selection of paintings again. This development resulted in artists demonstrating in the lead-up to the next Universal Exhibition, of 1867.95 As Boime points out, 1863 was seemingly a ‘landmark in the definitive formulation of the government’s visual regime’. Salon admission rules were restricted again, and, now that the Salon had been made annual, the Salon des Refusées was inaugurated and the École des Beaux-Arts reformed.96 The continued tensions between the administration and the Academy over inf luence on the artists’ training was ended by, as critics called it, a ‘coup d’état’ by the administration. On 13 November 1863, an official decree stipulated that the pedagogical program at the École des Beaux-Arts would be directly administered by the government.97 The classicism advocated by the Academy was now opposed by the École des Beaux-Arts where the government installed teachers who were proponents of official realism, among them Pils.98 That the administration chose a military painter to become the first teacher of painting (previously, only drawing was taught at the École des Beaux-Arts) is further testament to the importance it attached to the genre. From the mid-1860s, the government stopped commissioning major military paintings. Instead, although not destined for Versailles, the increasingly popular military genre scenes focusing on the individual soldier’s sufferings in the Crimean and Italian Wars found favour with the arts administration, and the paintings often hung in the central rooms of the Salons of the 1860s. It seems that a large number of these genre scenes were painted for the market, which accounts for the fact that many are today lost. Minor battle subjects continued to be commissioned but few of them were shown at the Salons; they were destined for museums in cities outside Paris.99 The emperor 94

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‘Il est impolitique et de mauvais goût de faire disparaître des tableaux représentant les faits glorieux accomplis sous les gouvernements passés, pour les remplacer par ceux qui doivent représenter les fastes du règne actuel,’ Nieuwerkerke to Marshall Vaillant, letter of 14 May 1866, Archives des musées nationaux V2. Mainardi, 1987, 124. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 596. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 597. The others were Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. For example, the Ministère d’État acquired Eupatoria by Durand-Brager on 7 November 1861 for the Musée de Nantes for 4,000 francs (Archives nationales F21/137 dossier 14) and

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mainly acquired military genre paintings of the Crimean War by lesser-known artists for his private collections when he noticed them at the Salons.100 The painting of increasingly unsuccessful military campaigns of the Second Empire, such as Napoleon III’s attempt to gain a foothold in the New World by imposing Archduke Maximilian of Austria as emperor of Mexico in 1864, were commissioned to military painters who had less convincing artistic claims than famous figures such as Yvon and Pils. Beaucé, Henri Philippoteaux (1815–1884), Antoine Alphonse Aillaud (?–1869), and the emerging Alphonse de Neuville (1835–1885) were charged with painting the battles of the politically delicate Mexican Campaign.101 Their inconspicuous compositions on – compared to previous commissions – smaller formats did not evoke much critical comment, and the politically delicate subjects did not risk political criticism. Looking back at the Second Empire’s Versailles project, Philippe Marquis de Chennevières, who worked for the arts administration under King Louis-Philippe and was in charge of the provincial museums and the organising of the Salons under the Second Empire, wrote in his memoirs about the failure of the Versailles commissions:102 The historical museum, Louis-Philippe’s favourite and truly national work, was by that very origin brought into disrepute with the imperial regime, which did not pride itself on growing its collections, and just continued with the contemporary series by having its sergeants and main officers killed by the enemy in the war of Crimea and Italy painted or sculpted, and by dispatching to the remaining large rooms that were yet to be filled, the vast paintings by Horace Vernet, Pils and Yvon.103

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Poitevin à Alma by Rigo on 16 July 1860 for the Musée de Nantes for 500 francs (Archives nationales F21/105 dossier 58); it commissioned Janet-Lange on 3 December 1859 to paint Combat de Kanghil for the Musée d’Épinal for 3,000 francs (Archives nationales F21/88 dossier 45). For example, Antoine Alphonse Aillaud’s, Voltigeur de la garde en Crimée, was remarked on by the emperor at the Salon and acquired in July 1864, then hung in Fontainebleau; Théodore-Louis Devilly’s L’assaut, souvenir de Crimée was remarked on by the sovereigns at the Salon of 1863 and was then acquired for the study at l’Élysée; see Granger, 2005, 461, 510. On Beaucé’s commission and research in Mexico, see Juliet Wilson-Bareau, ‘Manet and the Execution of Maximilian’, in Manet: The Execution of Maximilian – Painting, Politics and Censorship, ed. Juliet Wilson-Bareau, exh. cat., National Gallery, London (London: National Gallery Publications, 1992), 38–40. Jean-Adolphe Beaucé, Prise du fort de San-Xavier, devant Puebla, le 29 mars 1863, 1867, oil on canvas, 215 × 375 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. On Chennevières, see Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 4, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1869), s. v. ‘Chennevières.’ ‘Le musée historique, œuvre favorite et vraiment nationale de Louis-Philippe, était par cette origine même, frappé à l’avance de discrédit auprès du régime impérial qui ne se piqua point d’en grossir les collections, et se contenta d’en continuer les séries contemporaines en

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One has to treat with caution this polemical statement by someone who oversaw the inauguration of the museum under King Louis-Philippe (for example, the Second Empire arts administration commissioned, as we have seen, an abundance of paintings for Versailles), but there is an element of truth in this exaggeration. The commissioning strategies of the Second Empire were not nearly as coherent as those of the July Monarchy, which asked Vernet to work on paintings that would fit into a specific pictorial programme, in regard to formats and subject matter. The Salle de Crimée fell short of Mercey’s ambitious plans of 1856 due to drawn-out commissioning processes, late delivery of paintings, lack of space and the involvement of too many protagonists. As a result, the room, intended for posterity, existed only brief ly and partially. The Second Empire additions to Versailles may follow a narrative – the glorification and commemoration of the Crimean and Italian Campaigns – but they are aesthetically eclectic. The critical language employed in the press in the discussions of these paintings, which used a vocabulary and approach similar to those reserved for book reviews, is indicative of the quality of these commissions of official realism, which often departed from the realm of fine arts. Mere lack of space furthermore accounted for the chaos in Versailles that ensued once all the large formats had been installed there by the mid-1860s. An 1896 guide to Versailles describes the legacy of the Second Empire in Versailles as being scattered over two rooms: the Algerian paintings, the Crimean and Italian paintings, mixed with paintings of the civil deeds of Napoleon III, portraits of the imperial family and generals as well as busts of a ‘banal execution’.104 Probably by the beginning of the twentieth century, the room was disassembled.105 Today four smaller rooms in the north wing are called Salles de Crimée et d’Italie, and here hang some of the Second Empire paintings, though for much of the time covered by temporary exhibition walls.106

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faisant peindre ou sculpter, à cette destination, les figures de ses maréchaux et de ses principaux officiers tués à l’ennemi, dans les guerres de Crimée et d’Italie, et en expédiant vers les dernières grandes salles qui restassent à remplir, les vastes toiles d’Horace Vernet, de Pils et d’Yvon.’ Philippe de Chennevières, Souvenirs d’un directeur des beaux-arts (Paris: Arthena, 1979), 16. André Pératé and Pierre de Nolhac, Le Musée National de Versailles: Description du château et des collections (Paris: Maison Ad. Braun et Cie., 1896), 375–380; ‘exécution banale’, Pératé and Nolhac, 1896, 379. Frédéric Lacaille mentioned in conversation with me in January 2011 that the room was disassembled by the twentieth century. I also wish to thank him for drawing my attention to the fact that the Bibliothèque du Sénat was installed in the enfilade of rooms between 1871 and 1879, possibly leading to some paintings being removed during this time (email conversation of 2016). The Versailles guide of 1881 indeed notes Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma as the only one of the Crimean paintings still hanging in room 102. See Ris, Notice du Musée historique de Versailles, 37. The lower ceilings of the smaller Salles de Crimée et d’Italie do not allow for Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff to be installed, and the painting is currently rolled up.

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As we have seen, the measures that the Second Empire arts administration took to control the art world had a direct impact on the production and visuals of military paintings. During the first years of the Second Republic and early Second Empire, when the success of paintings of contemporary history were subject to changing political climates, military artists-to-be such as Pils and Yvon emerged. Consciously promoting young artists with incentives such as medals and salaries for commissions, the Second Empire saw the rise of a new generation of military painters. The spectrum of military subjects included First Empire and contemporary Algerian battles that continued to figure at most Second Empire Salons until Napoleon III’s unpopular military endeavours fuelled the project in Versailles for the Salle de Crimée, in which all military artists were involved to win over public opinion. However, the paintings’ f leeting topicality meant that their main stage remained the Salons where the paintings’ aesthetics captured or missed topical public moods about war. In the chapters that follow, it will be important to bear this entanglement of the state and military paintings in mind, in order to contextualise their formal strategies as tailored to public opinion.

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Pl. 1:  Horace Vernet, La Smala: Duc d’Aumale, 16 mai 1843, 1845, oil on canvas, 489 × 2139 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Pl. 2:  Jean-Charles Langlois, Maquette du panorama de la bataille des Pyramides, c. 1852, oil on canvas, 132 × 195 cm each, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen (present whereabouts and dimensions of original panorama canvas unknown).

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Pl. 3:  Louis François Lejeune, La Bataille des Pyramides, 21 juillet 1789, 1806, oil on canvas, 180 × 258 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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Pl. 4: Horace Vernet, Bataille de l’Alma (Crimée), 20 septembre 1854, 1857, oil on canvas, 188 × 294 cm, Palais Fesch, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ajaccio.

Pl. 5: Hippolyte Bellangé, Bataille de l’Alma, 20 septembre 1854, 1855, oil on canvas, 200 × 380 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Pl. 6: Eugène Lami, Bataille de l’Alma, 1855, oil on canvas, 130 × 225 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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Pl. 7: Gustave Doré, La bataille d’Inkermann, 5 novembre 1854, 1857, oil on canvas, 480 × 500 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Pl. 8:  Isidore Pils, Le débarquement de l’armée française en Crimée, 1857, oil on canvas, 190 × 329 cm, Palais Fesch, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ajaccio.

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Pl. 9:  Félix Barrias, Débarquement de l’armée française à Old-Port (Crimée), 14 septembre 1854, 1859, oil on canvas, 480 × 600 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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Pl. 10:  Eudore Soulié, plan for Salle de Crimée, 28 September 1859, Archives des musées nationaux V2 / 1855–1870.

Pl. 11:  Reconstruction based on Soulié’s plan of the Salle de Crimée, 28 September 1859, Archives des musées nationaux V2 / 1855–1870. On a scale of 1:200.

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Pl. 12:  Jules Rigo, Les chirurgiens français pansant des blessés russes à la bataille d’Inkermann (3 novembre 1854), 1856, oil on canvas, 370 × 360 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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Pl. 13:  Eugène Appert, Les sœurs de charité en Crimée, 1854, oil on canvas, 290 × 388 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Pl. 14:  Jules Rigo, Le général en chef Canrobert, venant le matin visiter une tranchée attaqué pendant la nuit par les Russes, distribue aux blessés des encouragement et des récompenses, 1859, oil on canvas, 254 × 373 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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Pl. 15:  Antoine Valentin Jumel de Noireterre, Bataille de Balaklava (35 octobre 1854), 1859, oil on canvas, 198 × 500 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.

Pl. 16: Alexandre Protais, Attaque et prise, le 7 juin 1855, du Mamelon-Vert et des Ouvrages-Blancs, par les troupes du 2e corps, sous le commandement du général Bosquet (Guerre de Crimée), 1859, oil on canvas, 385 × 585 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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Pl. 17: Henri Durand-Brager, Panorama des attaques de gauche, pris de l’observatoire du maréchal Canrobert, 1857, oil on canvas, 56 × 270 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Pl. 18: Henri Durand-Brager, Panorama des attaques de gauche, pris de l’extrême gauche des attaques, 1857, oil on canvas, 56 × 270 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Pl. 19: Henri Durand-Brager, Le Clocheton, 1857, oil on canvas, 56 × 88 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

109

Pl. 20: Henri Durand-Brager, Les entonnoirs, 1857, oil on canvas, 56 × 88 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Pl. 21: Henri Durand-Brager, Face droite du bastion du Mât, 1857, oil on canvas, 56 × 88 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

110

Pl. 22: Henri Durand-Brager, Panorama de Kamiesch, prise du fond du port, 1857, oil on canvas, 98 × 172 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Pl. 23: Jean-Charles Langlois, Maquette du panorama de la prise de Sébastopol, c. 1860, oil on canvas, 71 × 113 cm (each), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen (present whereabouts and dimensions of original panorama canvas unknown).

111

Pl. 24: Adolphe Yvon, Prise de la tour de Malakoff, le 8 septembre 1855, 1857, oil on canvas, 600 × 900 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

112

Pl. 25: Adolphe Yvon, La gorge de Malakoff (8 septembre 1855) (campagne de Crimée), 1859, oil on canvas, 500 × 750 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

113

Pl. 26: Adolphe Yvon, La courtine de Malakoff (8 septembre 1855) (campagne de Crimée), 1859, oil on canvas, 500 × 750 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

114

Pl. 27: Isidore Pils, Une tranchée devant Sébastopol, 1855, oil on canvas, 135 × 220 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.

115

Pl. 28: Adolphe Yvon, La bataille de Solférino, 24 juin 1859, 1861, oil on canvas, 600 × 900 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

116

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Pl. 29: Ernest Meissonier, L’Empereur à Solférino, 1864, oil on wood, 43.5 × 76 cm, Musée national du château de Compiègne.

Pl. 30: Ernest Meissonier, Campagne de France, 1814, 1864, oil on wood, 51.5 × 76.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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Pl. 31: Alexandre Protais, copy by the artist of Le matin; avant l’attaque, 1863, oil on canvas, 49 × 80 cm, Musée Condé, Chantilly (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

Pl. 32: Alexandre Protais, copy by the artist of Le soir; après le combat, 1863, oil on canvas, 49 × 80 cm, Musée Condé, Chantilly (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

Pl. 33: Alexandre Protais, La fin de la halte, 1864, oil on canvas, 123 × 200 cm, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse.

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III Painting the Crimean War

Historical background The Crimean War (October 1853–March 1856) was fought between the Russian Empire on one side and, on the other, the alliance of the French Second Empire, the British and Ottoman Empires and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. It was the climax of a long struggle between the major European powers for inf luence over the territories of the declining Ottoman Empire and the Black Sea. Its outbreak can be traced to Napoleon III’s decision to send a battleship to the Black Sea when Russia disputed his insistence on the Roman Catholic Church being the sovereign authority in the Ottoman territory of the Holy Land. When Russia subsequently mobilised her troops, France and Great Britain sided with Turkey and declared war in March 1854. The signing of a peace treaty in March 1856 brought an end to this conf lict, which had continued much longer than had been anticipated and which was notorious for the allies’ logistical and tactical errors throughout. In this section, I will outline the battles and siege of the Crimean War in some detail, in order to contextualise the role of the paintings as instruments of post-war politics. The actual trigger of the war was a seemingly anachronistic religious conf lict over the Ottoman-ruled Holy Places, over which both Russia and France claimed authority, as Orlando Figes elucidates in his comprehensive publication on the Crimean War which unravels the religious origins of the conf lict.1 Whereas Tsar Nicholas I was interested in extending his protection of the Eastern Church within the Ottoman Empire for spiritual reasons, Napoleon III’s motives were of a purely political nature. In terms of domestic policy, the conf lict with Russia in the Holy Land would secure the emperor the support of the French Roman Catholics and propitiate the revolutionary opposition to the Second Empire if it were to ‘fight for liberty against the “gendarme of Europe”’.2 Furthermore, a military victory against Russia would continue to stir 1 2

Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Penguin Books, 2010). Figes, 2010, 103.

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Bonapartist memories of military glory, which were crucial for the legitimisation of the young Second Empire, and make up for the still vivid memory of Napoleon’s humiliating retreat from Moscow in 1812.3 In terms of foreign politics, Napoleon III was hoping to revise France’s political exclusion dating back to the 1815 settlement.4 To restore his country’s recognition and inf luence abroad he sought an alliance with Britain, which in turn was interested in securing the Black Sea as a trading zone as well as keeping Russian inf luence at bay.5 The French public, however, was overwhelmingly against this war that ended forty years of relative peace in Europe.6 As Lynn Case shows, businessmen and peasants made up the strongest opposition, but the bourgeoisie was likewise against the war once the initial support fuelled by patriotism had waned.7 These social groups formed the main basis of Napoleon III’s regime and, torn between contradictions – namely his famous proclamation of a new era of peace at the beginning of his reign and the increasingly unavoidable war –, he often resorted to metaphors and allegories when addressing the public and soldiers.8 Apart from ubiquitous comparisons to the military glory of the First Empire, a common notion in his speeches was France’s civilising mission against the barbaric Russians, who threatened European equilibrium by pressuring Europe into a war it did not want. For example, he compared his regime to the reputed Roman Senate, underlining the civilising justice of his decisions over war and peace.9 Russophobe literature such as the sought-after book by Gustave Doré, La Sainte Russie (1854), fostered these notions that repeatedly implied the defeat of 1812 as a justification for hostilities.10 Paradoxically, along these lines the war came to be fought under the banner of peace. It is important to note that it was only the Catholic provincial press that compared this war, triggered by religious conf lict, to the Crusades, whereas the emperor merely made sure to emphasise that this would be a short war having nothing   3

  4   5   6   7   8   9

10

David Baguley, Napoleon  III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 163. In not a single speech sending the troops off to the Crimea did Napoleon III forget to remind his soldiers of their Napoleonic predecessors and the victories of the Grande Armée. See Napoleon III, Discours, messages, et proclamations de S. M. Napoléon III empereur des français: 1849­­­–1860 (Paris: Mirecourt, Humbert, 1860). Figes, 2010, xxii. Figes, 2010, 102. Lynn Marshall Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 15–50. Case, 1972, 50. On contradictions of Napoleon III’s politics, see Baguley, 2000, 173. Napoleon III on the occasion of the return of the troops from the Crimea on 29 December 1855: ‘Soldiers, I step in front of you, like once the Roman Senate went to the gates of Rome in front of its victorious legions.’ (Soldats, je viens au-devant vous, comme autrefois le Sénat romain allait aux portes de Rome au-devant de ses légions victorieuses.), Napoleon III, 1860, 124. Gustave Doré, Histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie (Paris: J. Bry Aîné, 1854).

Historical background

Fig. 18:  Alexandre Protais, ‘Crimée – Batterie: Mamelon Vert’, Album de dessins realisés en Crimée, en Italie et à Metz, 1854–1870, pen on paper, 26.55 × 72 cm (opened), Musée de l’Armée, Paris.

to do with conquest.11 He compared the Armée d’Orient with his uncle’s Armée d’Égypte but emphasised that they were fighting for different reasons.12 The notion of a ‘guerre d’équilibre’ was propagated in history books such as the official Histoire populaire de la France (1864). However, it failed to convince the public, which grew increasingly sceptical the longer the war took and the more it threatened human lives and France’s economy. Throughout the war, public opinion played a crucial role in inf luencing the decisions of military leaders. The press coverage, though subject to censorship, was unprecedented, with journalists reporting from the theatre of war, photographers such as Roger Fenton on-site, and artists’ sketches of battle scenes published weekly in magazines such as L’Illustration.13 Many artists who had contributed sketches to be published in magazines would later turn them into paintings. Protais, for example, using a sketch he executed on-site, published a print of the taking of a Russian redoubt in L’Illustration on 30 June 1855, three weeks after the event, and exhibited a painting of the same composition three years later at the Salon of 1857 (Fig. 18, Fig. 19, Fig. 20).14 Photographers and print journalists, however, refrained from publishing images of corpses, which featured only in the unpublished on-site sketches by Protais (Fig. 21). In general,

11 12 13

14

Napoleon III, 1860, 109–110. Napoleon III, 1860, 114. Until the 1890s, photographs were not mass-reproduced in periodicals or newspapers. At the time of the Crimean War, wood-engraving – often engraved from a drawing or photograph – was the main means of circulating images of the theatre of war. See John Milner, Art, War and Revolution in France 1870–1871: Myth, Reportage and Reality (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), x. From autumn 1853 onwards, almost every issue of L’Illustration published articles on different war protagonists. For example, it introduced the commander-in-chief of the Ottoman army, Omer-Pacha, to its readers with a printed portrait and article. See A. Ubicini, ‘Omer-Pacha’, L’Illustration 22, no. 554 (8 October 1853), 248–249.

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Fig. 19:  Alexandre Protais, ‘Prise du Mamelon Vert’, L’Illustration 25, no. 644 (30 June 1855).

Fig. 20:  Alexandre Protais, Prise d’une des batteries du Mamelon vert: Mort de M. de Brancion, colonel du 50e (7 juin 1855), 1857, oil on canvas, 156 × 201 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Historical background

Fig. 21:  Alexandre Protais, ‘Crimée: Mamelon Vert’, Album de dessins realisés en Crimée, en Italie et à Metz, 1854–1870, pen on paper, 26.55 × 72 cm (opened), Musée de l’Armée, Paris.

as Ulrich Keller points out, the Crimean War gave rise in England to the profession of the journalist and with it an unprecedentedly immediate and unmasked experience of war at the home front. French press coverage of the Crimean War differed crucially in that it was heavily controlled.15 The conf lict intensified when the Ottomans finally conceded to pressure from France’s ambassador in Constantinople and sided with France against Russia. What followed was a chain of events throughout 1853 during which Napoleon III responded to Russian threats by ordering the advance of the naval fleet towards the Black Sea, thereby allowing the crisis to escalate. As a consequence, the war, now still called the Guerre d’Orient, started between the Ottoman and Russian forces in Moldavia and Wallachia and eventually spread to the Caucasus and from there to other areas of the Black Sea.16 When France and Britain declared war in March 1854 after Russia had ignored an Anglo-French ultimatum to withdraw its forces against the Ottomans, the main theatre of war shifted to the Crimea and Russia’s Black Sea naval base, the city and harbour of Sevastopol, and was henceforth referred to in the press as the Guerre de Crimée.17 15

16 17

Ulrich Keller, ‘Schlachtenbilder, Bilderschlachten – Zur visuellen Kultur des Krimkrieges’, in Der Krimkrieg als erster europäischer Medienkrieg: Kultur und Technik, eds. Georg Maag and Wolfram Pyta, vol. 14 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010). Figes, 2010, xx. The Crimean War was in fact fought in Moldavia, Wallachia, today’s Romania, the Caucasus, other areas around the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the White Sea and the Pacific coastline of Siberia. See Figes, 2010, xx.

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The French troops were led by Marshal Saint-Arnaud, who had already played an important role during the Algerian Campaign under the July Monarchy. He became famous for his courage during the Capture of Constantine (1837) but also for his ruthlessness as the person responsible for the massacre of Dahra of 18 June 1845, during which he ordered the killing of one thousand civilians of an Algerian tribe by driving them into grottoes where they were smoked out, an event which led to a public outcry in the French press.18 Nevertheless, Saint-Arnaud, having helped Louis-Napoleon come to power during the coup d’état, continued to play an important role during the Second Empire, culminating in his appointment as commander-in-chief of the French forces in March 1854.19 This turned out to be a difficult job. As early as 26 May 1854, in a letter addressed to the emperor, Saint-Arnaud described what would become notorious throughout the war: ‘I say it with pain to Your Majesty […] we are neither made nor in the state to be at war as we are today.’20 Even before the French army encountered their enemy, it was decimated by disease and food shortages caused by a fire at Varna, the allies’ first camp on their way to the Crimea. According to Figes, ‘the whole of south-east Europe was struck by cholera in the summer of 1854’.21 The Moniteur Universel, however, was quick to reassure the French public: But the morale of the troops is still excellent, and we can today announce with satisfaction that, on all levels, the sanitary state is notably improving […]. The reports from Gallipoli, dating from the tenth of this month, announce that currently it can be considered that (the army) is almost liberated from cholera and that the enemy’s army is considerably worse hit than ours.22 Over the next two years, the allied forces would continue to suffer from disease and, being often insufficiently equipped, harsh weather conditions such as biting cold during the winter and hurricanes that destroyed their camps during the autumn. 18

19 20

21 22

On the events at Dahra, see Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 6, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1870), s. v. ‘Dahra.’ On Saint-Arnaud’s role at Dahra, see Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 14, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1875), s. v. ‘Saint-Arnaud.’ Gouttman, 2006, 118. ‘Je le dis avec douleur à Votre Majesté […] nous ne sommes pas constitués ni en état de faire la guerre tels que nous sommes aujourd’hui.’ Alain Gouttman, La guerre de Crimée, 1853– 1856: La première guerre moderne (Paris: Perrin, 2006), 124. Figes, 2010, 191. ‘Mais le moral des troupes est toujours excellent, et nous pouvons annoncer aujourd’hui avec satisfaction que sur tous les points l’état sanitaire s’améliore d’une manière notable […]. Les rapports de Gallipoli, en date du 10 de ce mois, annoncent que sur ce point l’on peut se considérer comme à peu près délivré du choléra […] l’armée ennemie est frappée bien plus encore que la nôtre.’ Le Moniteur Universel no. 233 (21 August 1854).

Historical background

The first encounter with the Russian enemy, however, lifted the spirits of the allied troops and the British and French public alike. In an attempt to block the allies’ march from the north of the Crimean Peninsula to Sevastopol in the south, the whole of the Russian army awaited them on the Alma heights on 20 September 1854.23 The Battle of the Alma was won thanks to the specialised mountain training of the French regiment of the zouaves, who would continue to play a decisive role for the rest of the war. Unlike the British, who had not fought a major war since the Napoleonic Wars, the French soldiers had the benefit of recent experience from fighting in Algeria on a regular basis. As Figes explains, the zouaves, in particular, ‘were masters of the fast attack and tactical retreat, a type of fighting they developed in Algeria, and their courage was an inspiration to the rest of the French infantry, who invariably followed them into battle’.24 Their conduct at the Battle of the Alma and their popularity with the French public will be discussed at length in relation to the paintings of the battle by Bellangé, Vernet, Lami and Pils. On the evening after the Battle of the Alma when the French troops had successfully repulsed the Russian enemy and cleared the way to Sevastopol, Saint-Arnaud addressed his soldiers: ‘Soldiers, France and the Emperor will be proud of you. At Alma, you have proven to the Russians that you are the worthy sons of the victors of Eylau and Moscow.’25 On the same day, the French made a fatal mistake when they urged their allies to abandon the original war plans to march swiftly towards Sevastopol and attack it from the north.26 Sevastopol was poorly protected. Had the allies attacked immediately, they would probably have been successful and the staggering death toll of the eleven-month-long siege could have been avoided.27 Instead, the allies followed the French suggestion to besiege Sevastopol from the south, which they believed was less fortified than the north of the city. This plan, as Figes notes, was surprisingly antiquated, going back to seventeenth-century warfare strategies ‘that involved the slow and methodological process of digging trenches towards the town’s defences so that it could be bombarded by artillery before an assault by troops’.28 The allies decided to march all the way around and to the south of the city, giving the Russians time to catch up on 23 24 25

26

27 28

The allies landed in Evpatoria on 13 September 1854 from where they advanced southward towards Sevastopol. Figes, 2010, 178. ‘Soldats, la France et l’Empereur seront contents de vous. À Alma, vous avez prouvé aux Russes que vous étiez les dignes fils des vainqueurs d’Eylau et de la Moskowa.’ Maréchal Saint-Arnaud, ‘Ordre général: Champ de bataille de l’Alma, le 20 septembre 1854.’ Lettres du maréchal de Saint-Arnaud 1832–1854, vol. 2 (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1858), 580. The French had several reasons for abandoning the war plans, one of which was that they needed to collect their kitbags on the other side of the Alma before marching towards Sevastopol. See Figes, 2010, 222–225. Anthony Saunders, Trench Warfare 1850–1950 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2010), 35; Figes, 2010, 222. Figes, 2010, 225.

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Sevastopol’s defence works. Meanwhile, the command of the French troops passed from Saint-Arnaud to François Certain de Canrobert when the former finally succumbed to a disease from which he had been suffering for years. On 27 September 1854 the allies reached the sites south of Sevastopol, which would become the stage of the siege, described by Larousse twenty years later as follows: This siege is unique in history, by the extent of the means of attack and the defence that opposed reciprocally the most martial nations of Europe, as well as by the courage, the persistency with which it was undertaken and pursued and the indomitable energy with which it was carried out.29 In the press the siege was often compared to that of Troy in Homer’s Iliad, underlining the civilising mission the allies believed they were fighting for.30 Under Canrobert’s command, the allies began entrenching on 9 October, a task that they carried out under cover of night and often under the enemy’s fire.31 The trenches were first opened on 17 October 1854 when the allies began the bombardment of the city of Sevastopol and were met by a Russian counter-bombardment, which would become a daily routine for the rest of the siege.32 Saunders points out that the Russians’ ‘nightly repairs to the earthwork defences, however, largely nullified the effect of the allied gunfire and this pattern of destruction and repair was repeated many times during the course of the siege’.33 The autumn of 1854 was marked by two main battles, both provoked by the Russians, who attacked the overstretched British positions (while the French had 90,000 troops by mid-February 1855, the British had only 12,00034); the allies won both battles thanks to last-minute support by the French. At the Battle of Balaklava on 25 October, the French reinforcements saved the British from losing their harbour at the Bay of Balaklava, which was their main supply route during the siege.35 At the Battle

29

30

31 32 33 34 35

‘Ce siège est unique dans l’histoire, autant par l’immensité des moyens d’attaque et de défense que s’opposèrent réciproquement les nations les plus guerrières de l’Europe, que par le courage, la constance avec lesquels il fut entrepris et poursuivi et l’énergie indomptable avec laquelle il fut soutenu.’ Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1875, s. v. ‘Sébastopol.’ On the frequent comparisons of the Crimean War to the Trojan War and the Iliad, see Saint-René Taillandier, ‘L’historien et l’histoire de la guerre de Crimée’, Revue des deux mondes 27, no. 3 (1 May 1878), 70. In 1856, Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) started writing the opera Les Troyens (completed in 1862), based on Virgil’s Aeneid, confirming the topicality of the subject in French culture at the time. Saunders, 2010, 35. Saunders, 2010, 37; Figes, 2010, 236–237. Saunders, 2010, 37. Saunders, 2010, 37. The Russians celebrated the Battle of Balaklava as a victory. See Figes, 2010, 253.

Historical background

of Inkerman on 5 November, Lord Raglan sent an urgent call for help to the French, who eventually hindered the Russians from taking the British position on Mount Inkerman. In both battles, the zouaves had saved the day. In particular, at the Battle of Inkerman the zouaves’ training in the mountains of Algeria allowed them to fight in the low visibility of a foggy Crimean day.36 For the winter, however, none of the allies was prepared. Figes observes that ‘confident of a quick victory, the allied commanders had made no plans for the troops to spend a winter on the heights above Sebastopol’.37 While the British had not been sent adequate winter clothing, the French had sheepskins and eventually fur-lined hooded cloaks.38 Nevertheless, both sets of troops continued to suffer from cholera, dysentery, starvation and frostbite from the thick layer of wet snow; many died of hypothermia. The great losses among the British in particular also meant that the effective power of the British forces was decreased and that the British command during that time played a minor role in the development of future war plans, the French being the senior partner.39 Meanwhile the French public, who had previously shown a distinct lack of interest in the war, increasingly turned against it as, despite press censorship, news trickled through about the conditions of the army; Napoleon III came under increasing pressure to end the war.40 After the winter and throughout 1855, the allies launched several attacks against Russian redoubts, notably the Malakoff and the Redan, the Russians responding with counter-attacks.41 When General Pélissier took over as commander-in-chief after Canrobert’s resignation in May 1855, the main goal became to capture the Malakoff, the allies having come to believe that this would lead to the fall of Sevastopol. Following the success of several assaults, the planned final assault on the Malakoff on 18 June ended in carnage, causing a trauma that would stay irrevocably in the French public consciousness. The French lost 6,000 men, partly because Pélissier had adopted sudden last-minute changes of plan, which unsettled the French troops and disjointed their plan of action from that of the British troops.42 After this humiliating defeat, which demoralised the allied troops substantially and, as Case’s analysis of the reports to the French government from the procureurs générals and the préfets shows, further increased anti-war sentiment among the French public, the siege regressed to the routine of digging trenches and artillery fire.43 The routine of these summer months was only interrupted

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Figes, 2010, 264. Figes, 2010, 280. Figes, 2010, 280. Saunders, 2010, 38; Figes, 2010, 272. Case, 1972, 31–32. Saunders, 2010, 45. Figes, 2010, 367–369. Figes, 2010, 373; Case, 1972, 37.

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on 16 August 1855 when the Russians attacked the French and Sardinian positions on the Chernaia River. After this assault ended in disaster for the Russians, the capture of Sevastopol by the allies was only a question of time.44 The successful and final assault on the Malakoff of 8 September 1855 was carried out with the same tactics as the previous assaults, except that this time it was better planned.45 For the first time in history, all the leaders involved in the attack had synchronised their watches. When the British were initially repulsed, French supporting fire enabled the French to take the Malakoff and the British to take another Russian defence structure, the Redan. The allies entered Sevastopol on 9 September 1855. When the news of the fall of Sevastopol reached Paris, France erupted into joyful festivities. However, as I will discuss in relation to the artistic representations of the fall of the Malakoff, the meaning of the falls of both Sevastopol and the Malakoff as the victorious endpoint of the war was open to interpretation.46 While the fighting was over, the war was not officially concluded until the end of March of the next year. In fact, the French troops suffered from this second winter much more than from the first, decimated by cold and disease. None of this, however, affected the joyous mood back in France over the victory, which restored the popularity of the regime and the emperor.47 Case points out that the rapture stemmed more from a desire for peace than a feeling of victory.48 Indeed, the emperor alluded to this pervasive public feeling in his famous speech at the close of the Universal Exhibition, shortly after the fall of Sevastopol: ‘At the sight of so many marvels spread out before our eyes, the first impression is a desire for peace. Only peace, in fact, can develop still more these remarkable products of human intelligence. You must all then wish with me that this peace may be swift and lasting.’49 The Congress of Paris, at which the delegates of the parties involved in the Crimean War came together to work out a peace treaty, was a success for Napoleon III as it demonstrated that France was again a leading force in world affairs. The emperor, as host of the sessions, was instrumental in bringing about the successful signing of the

44 45 46

47 48 49

Figes, 2010, 384. Saunders, 2010, 47. I am using Figes’ observation about the symbolic nature of the taking of Sevastopol to shed light on the motives of the commissioning strategies of the Second Empire’s arts administration: Figes points out that the emperor focused on Sevastopol as a symbol of victory to satisfy the French public and restore the image of his regime. See Figes, 2010, 328. Case, 1972, 49. Case, 1972, 39, 50. ‘À la vue de tant de merveilles étalées à nos yeux, la première impression est un désir de paix. La paix seule, en effet, peut développer encore ces remarquables produits de l’intelligence humaine. Vous devez donc tous souhaiter comme moi que cette paix soit prompte et durable.’ speech of 16 November 1855, Napoleon III, 1860, 123–124.

Historical background

peace treaty on 30 March 1856, despite the wishes of both Britain and Russia to continue the war. The Traité de Paris stipulated that all powers respect the independence of the Ottoman Empire and not establish any military bases in the Black Sea, considerably restricting Russia’s inf luence. Despite the lack of any major territorial gains, the French as the driving force behind the fall of Sevastopol and the host nation of the treaty were the prime beneficiaries of the Crimean War.50 Napoleon III saw in the Congress of Paris a form of compensation for the humiliating Congress of Vienna of 1815, a French trauma redeemed by the Crimean War.51 The errors of the high command faded into insignificance alongside France’s new place in world affairs, and the achievements of the troops, particularly the zouaves and the turcos, were celebrated in the press and immortalised in paintings. In the introduction to his anecdotal biography À l’ombre du drapeau: Épisodes de la vie militaire (1856), the patriot Bathild Bouniol recognised the Crimean War as a watershed for France’s self-esteem: The Guerre d’Orient, in fact, has admirably shown everything that is chivalric, courageous and religious, as well as original and vivid, in our national character, which a long peace, under sometimes unpleasant circumstances, had deprived of some of its virility. For us, too, Christian and French, is it not a supreme joy to see that France, in the shadow of its victorious eagles, to whom the cross is gloriously married, has reclaimed its place in the avant-garde of the nations, and that, with the new admiration of Europe and the world, it is lifted, by the devotion of its sons, to its high rank from which the misfortune of the times had demoted it? 52

50 51 52

Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854–1856 (London: Abacus, 2000), 482. Dictionnaire du Second Empire, ed. Jean Tulard (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 381. ‘La guerre d’Orient, en effet, a mis admirablement en relief tout ce qu’il y a de chevaleresque, de vaillant et de religieux, comme aussi d’original et de vif dans notre caractère national, auquel une longue paix, dans des conditions parfois fâcheuses, avait fait perdre quelque chose de sa virilité. Pour nous aussi, chrétiens et Français, n’est-ce pas une joie suprême de voir que la France, à l’ombre de ses aigles victorieuses, auxquelles se marie glorieusement la croix, a repris sa place à l’avant-garde des nations, et que de nouveau l’admiration de l’Europe et du monde, elle est remontée, par le dévouement de ses fils, à ce haut rang d’où le malheur des temps l’avait fait déchoir?’ Bathild Bouniol, À l’ombre du drapeau: Épisodes de la vie militaire. Empire, Algérie, Crimée (Paris: Librairie d’Ambroise Bray, 1856), 276.

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The failure of traditional compositions in depictions of the Battle of the Alma The Crimean War was a turning point for the genre of military painting. Established visual formulae that foregrounded the high command failed to satisfy the critics’ increasing call for historical accuracy and therefore the commissioners’ demand for a pictorial language that was glorifying but also credible. Only in 1861 did a painter finally find the solution to depicting a battle in a way that satisfied the critics: Isidore Pils with his Bataille de l’Alma, which will be discussed at the end of this chapter (Fig. 47). The increasing call for the depiction of historical accuracy was directly linked to Horace Vernet, as a critic noted in 1861: ‘The modern master Horace Vernet has put this art on the track of vérité […]. Today a battle painting really depicts an action, in its entirety or in its details, with a much less theatrical but more accurate aspect.’53 The following discussion of the critical failure of three paintings of the Battle of the Alma by Bellangé, Vernet and Lami maps out the reasons why contemporaries considered the paintings to have fallen short of depicting the nature of the Crimean War. It introduces the yardstick for judging the representations of the Crimean War and the catalyst for pictorial innovations in the genre of military paintings: the notion of vérité historique. Charles Blanc described the dilemma for battle painters in his 1867 Grammaire des arts du dessin: Battles […] it is impossible to paint them with a truth (vérité) other than the appearance of truth (vraisemblance). How to represent in a single moment an action that has lasted an entire day? How to maintain in a painting the exactitude of strategic movement, the precision of a report, the fidelity of history? The talent of the painter evidently consists in choosing the trait that is most interesting for the action, the most characteristic episode, the decisive moment.54 Against the background of this problem, this chapter focuses on the novelty, innovation, and instability of the grandes machines representing the Crimean War.

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‘Le maître moderne, Horace Vernet, a fait entrer cet art dans la voie de la vérité […]. Aujourd’hui un tableau de bataille représent véritablement l’action dans son ensemble ou dans ses détails, avec un aspect beaucoup moins théâtral, mais plus juste.’ Anonymous, ­L’armée française à l’exposition de peinture de 1861 (Paris: Henri Plon, 1861), 33. ‘Les Batailles […] il est impossible de les peindre avec une vérité autre que la vraisemblance. Comment représenter en un seul moment une action qui a duré tout un jour? Comment conserver dans le tableau l’exactitude des mouvements stratégiques, la précision du bulletin, la fidélité de l’histoire? Le talent du peintre consiste évidemment à choisir le trait le plus intéressant de l’action, l’épisode le plus caractéristique, l’instant décisif.’ Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1867), 654.

The failure of traditional compositions in depictions of the Battle of the Alma

The Battle of the Alma was the result of the only planned French attack with a successful outcome of the Crimean War and was therefore upheld by the government as an example of the (questioned) capability of the French high command. The battle would be the military subject most frequently commissioned over the course of the Second Empire; it took on an especially important political urgency at the exhibition of 1855, when the continuation of the war had to be justified, and of 1857, when narratives of the recently concluded war were still being shaped.55 Among many others, the most eminent painters of the day, Horace Vernet (Pl. 4) and Hippolyte Bellangé (Pl. 5) as well as Vernet’s pupil Eugène Lami (Pl. 6), were entrusted with painting the battle. The paintings by all three artists focused on the high command of the French forces. In all three works the viewer, like Saint-Arnaud and his staff, faces the enemy located on the Alma heights to the south. As the accompanying texts of the Salon catalogues explain, the works depict moments when one of the generals orders an attack. Both Bellangé’s and Lami’s Bataille de l’Alma were exhibited at the Salon of 1855 when the war was still raging. Bellangé’s painting (Pl. 5) shows the moment when Saint-Arnaud ordered the central attack on the hill chain. The Alma heights were defended by the Russians in order to block the allied forces’ march southwards to their final goal, Sevastopol. As the livret reveals, three divisions hurry ahead from the right to the left picture margin towards the hilltop and the Russians. Showing SaintArnaud’s order for the central attack carried out by Prince Napoleon, Canrobert and Forey, Bellangé’s painting is set chronologically before the other paintings. Lami’s work (Pl. 6), commissioned by the emperor as the livret indicates, parades the entire high command in the right foreground, watching the battle ahead. The left foreground is dominated by a pile of corpses of the British infantry recognisable by their white trousers and red coats, reminding the viewer of Lord Raglan’s decision to delay the British advance in contravention of what had previously been laid down in the allies’ plan of battle. With the Russians’ focus now entirely on the latecomers, the British were decimated by heavy fire from Russian Cossack skirmishers.56 Also at the left but behind the scattered corpses, one can discern a group of British Highlanders by

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At the Salon of 1855 were exhibited four paintings of the battle; at the Salon of 1857 two, and at the Salons of 1861 and 1863 one each. See Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Beaux-arts, Avenue Montaigne, le 15 mai 1855 (Paris: Vinchon, imprimeur des musées impériaux, 1855), cat. 2496, 2504, 2982, 5462; Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 15 juin 1857 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1857), cat. 2284, 2620; Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1861 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1861), cat. 2555; Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1863 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1863), cat. 1020. Figes, 2010, 209–211.

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their red jackets, Scottish kilts and feather bonnets.57 The prominence of the high command in Lami’s painting matches Baron de Bazancourt’s official description in L’expédition de Crimée jusqu’à la prise de Sébastopol. Chronique de la guerre d’Orient (1857) of General Saint-Arnaud’s elevated position during the battle: Placed on a hilltop, the marshal overlooks the ensemble of the movements of his army; he follows with his gaze the brave troops dispersed at different points, and climbing under the deadly fire from the Alma. ‘Oh! The brave soldiers!’ … he exclaims all the time, ‘Oh! The worthy sons of Austerlitz and Friedland!’.58 The First Empire overtones of Bazancourt’s description of the battle are ref lected in Lami’s painting where the frontal viewpoint of the high command towards the enemy recalls the First Empire military strategy of the frontal attack.59 The third painting of the battle, Vernet’s Bataille de l’Alma (Pl. 4), shows the moment when Prince Napoleon orders his third division to cross the Alma River to attack the Russians on the hills behind the river. It hung in the central exhibition room at the Salon of 1857 and was commissioned by Prince Napoleon himself. The prince, in white trousers, is shown on horseback in the centre foreground of the canvas and in the midst of the high command. He stretches out his right arm, pointing towards the hill chain in the background and the Russian enemy. The division he leads is barely recognisable in the background, denoted as black dots at the foot of the hill, the last of the soldiers still wading through the river. Instead of looking towards the division, Prince Napoleon’s head is turned towards the picture plane, his eyes directly engaging with the spectator and not with the figure mounted on a grey horse that is placed on the picture plane between Prince Napoleon and us. To the left of the grey horse’s back, we notice a small cannonball hovering in the air of the centre foreground, which has already made an impact on the terrain once and is now threatening to hit the horse or the spectator, emphasising that the high command was in reach of the deadly fire. In the left middle ground, a burning house calls to mind that the Russians had set a village in 57

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They would later contribute decisively to the successful outcome of the battle but are shown in Lami’s painting standing around, one with hands on his hips, crossing his legs and looking at his dead comrades. For an identification of their uniforms, see An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Military Uniforms of the Nineteenth Century, eds. Kevin F. Kiley and Digby Smith (London: Lorenz Books, 2010), 28. ‘Placé sur un mamelon, le maréchal embrasse l’ensemble des mouvements de son armée; il suit du regard ses vaillantes troupes dispersées sur les différents points, et gravissant sous un feu meurtrier les pentes de l’Alma. “Oh! les braves soldats! … s’écrie-t-il souvent. Oh! les dignes fils d’Austerlitz et de Friedland!”’, Baron de Bazancourt, L’expédition de Crimée jusqu’à la prise de Sébastopol: Chronique de la guerre d’Orient, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie d’Amyot, 1857), 222–223. That the Battle of the Alma was similar to First Empire battles is pointed out by Figes, 2010, xix.

The failure of traditional compositions in depictions of the Battle of the Alma

front of the hills on fire in order to impede the allies.60 The rest of the foreground is dominated by groups of soldiers and civilians engaged in activities unrelated to the battle; for example, at the lower right corner, a Tatar, a member of a tribe indigenous to the Crimean Peninsula which sided with the allies against Russia, is washing a horse’s hooves.61 A British Highlander and a French zouave, both injured, are walking towards the left picture corner and the viewer. The background gives a general overview of the theatre of war, including the sea dotted with the allied ships and the allied divisions marching towards the enemy on the hills. Smoke clouds from the burning house and the cannon fire on the hills pervade the canvas. Critics denied all three paintings of the Battle of the Alma the quality of vérité. In 1855, at Vernet’s retrospective, it was still considered that the artist’s meticulous execution and anecdotes contributed to a ‘reality effect’, leading critics to take the subjects at face value, although they were, in hindsight, also manipulative propaganda images. But now, in 1857, Vernet’s paintings had to abandon the field in the face of the press coverage of the Crimean War, and Calonne wrote when reviewing Vernet’s painting in 1857: ‘Twenty-five years ago, one might have paid some attention to this painting; today even the masses do not find in it enough vérité to stop in front of it.’62 Even the intended entertainment effect of the anecdotal scenes in the foreground of the painting, which had still drawn crowds in 1855, was now considered boring. Jules Verne complained: This painting certainly came from the brush of M. Horace Vernet, but it is equally certain that it will add little to his military glory; nothing in it was missing, neither the burning house at the left, nor the zouave and the highlander who are reciprocally injured, nor the horse that rears up in front of a cannonball leaving the picture frame.63 The small cannonball especially seems harmless if not absurd compared to the effect of immediacy in Yvon’s painting (Pl. 24) displayed at the same Salon. As will soon become clear, the shock value of Yvon’s canvas succeeded in adding a reality effect to the painting, which formerly only Vernet’s paintings had achieved. Calonne attributed Vernet’s 60 61 62

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Figes, 2010, 210. On the Tartars see Figes, 2010, 10. ‘Il y a vingt-cinq ans, on aurait peut-être pris quelque attention à cette toile; aujourd’hui la foule elle-même n’y trouve pas assez de vérité pour s’y arrêter.’ Alphonse de Calonne, ‘Exposition des beaux-arts de 1857’, Revue contemporaine 32 (1 July 1857), 597. ‘Cette toile est certainement due au pinceau de M. Horace Vernet, mais il est bien certain qu’elle ajoutera peu à sa gloire militaire: rien n’y manqué, ni l’incendie de la maison de gauche, ni le zouave et le highlander réciproquement blessés, ni le cheval qui se cabre devant un boulet qui sort du cadre.’ Jules Verne, ‘Salon de 1857: Premier article’, Revue des beaux-arts 8, no. 13 (1857), 250.

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failure to convince to the zeitgeist of the period, noting: ‘This is because vérité or realism, as one calls it in some studios, has made great progress amongst us.’64 One could argue that the denial of vérité to the depictions of the Battle of the Alma was based not on shortcomings of artistic execution but on a betrayal of historical truthfulness. In reality, the attacks depicted in the three paintings only followed the moment of victory when Bosquet and his infantry division of the zouaves had surprised and overwhelmed the Russians on their undefended left f lank. An illustration in Bazancourt’s official war account represents the zouaves, climbing the cliffs facing the sea, which the Russians had judged too steep and therefore left unguarded (Fig. 22). Admittedly, to define the moment that decides victor and vanquished has been judged impossible by military theorists such as Carl von Clausewitz in the nineteenth century.65 However, in relation to the Battle of the Alma, contemporaries and historians today still believe that Bosquet’s movement marked this crucial point and the Larousse dictionary would write in 1867: ‘Everyone remembers the brilliant success of this movement of conversion that assured the victory of the Battle of the Alma and which has kept the name mouvement tournant du général Bosquet.’66 After having taken the Russian positions on the Alma heights, Bosquet signalled his success to Saint-Arnaud who then ordered the frontal attack depicted in Vernet’s, Bellangé’s and Lami’s paintings. The commanding gesture of Prince Napoleon in the foreground of Vernet’s painting seems especially ironic considering that his division did not at first even manage to cross the Alma River under heavy fire from the enemy. By referencing the famous ‘raised arm’ of Napoleon  I, the gesture becomes a shallow symbol.67 The paintings show the frontal attack so typical of the wars fought in the Napoleonic era and thus establish a visual link between the commissioners’ achievements and their illustrious predecessor Napoleon I. By showing this frontal attack, one necessarily had to omit Bosquet’s deeds, which took place on the sea side of the hill chain, out of sight of the high command.

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‘C’est que la vérité ou le réalisme, comme on l’appelle dans quelques ateliers, a fait parmi nous de terribles progrès.’ Calonne, 1 July 1857, 597. On Clausewitz’ definition of the decisive moment of a battle in relation to painting, see Christopher Prendergast, Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros’s La Bataille d’Eylau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 133. ‘Tout le monde se rappelle le brillant succès de ce mouvement de conversion qui assura le gain de la bataille de l’Alma, et qui a conservé le nom de mouvement tournant du général Bosquet.’ Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 2, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1867), s. v. ‘Bosquet.’ On Bosquet’s and his regiment’s climbing of the Alma heights having decided the outcome of the Battle of the Alma, see Gouttman, 2006, 217; and Figes, 2010, 209. In a similarly subversive way, Tolstoy, who was taking an anti-French position, described how the ‘terrible swing’ of Napoleon’s arm sunk after the disastrous Battle of Borodino. See Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, first published 1865–1869 (London: Vintage Books, 2007), 819.

The failure of traditional compositions in depictions of the Battle of the Alma

Fig. 22: ‘Les zouaves à l’Alma’ in: Baron de Bazancourt, L’expédition de Crimée jusqu’à la prise de Sébastopol. Chronique de la guerre d’Orient, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie d’Amyot, 1857), 208.

The obvious twisting of historical truth by omitting the decisive moment of battle backfired. Vernet’s painting was suspected of being merely a translation of ‘the report sent to the minister of war by the commander-in-chief ’.68 Similarly, the changed reception patterns could not be deceived by Bellangé’s Battle of the Alma, Charles Perrier deploring that ‘it is the principal actors who have been relegated to the distance in the background of the painting. This is a visible contradiction.’69 68 69

‘le rapport envoyé au ministre de la guerre par le général en chef ’, Gustave Planche, ‘Le Salon de 1857’, Revue des deux mondes 10 (15 July 1857), 387. ‘[…] ce sont les principaux acteurs qu’on a relégués dans les lointains aux derniers plans du tableau. C’est un contre-sens visible’, Charles Perrier, ‘Exposition universelle des beauxarts (VII). La peinture française – Histoire. M. Léon Cogniet. MM. Couture, Chasseriau, Robert-Fleury, Muller, Glaize, Yvon etc.’ L’Artiste 15 (1 July 1855), 117. On Bellangé’s ‘tin soldiers’, see Edmond About, Nos artistes au Salon de 1857 (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie., 1858), 347. On the absence of the enemy in Vernet’s Bataille de l’Alma, La Gavinie

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The genre employed by the three artists was an established celebratory mode. In 1859 Du Pays called the compositional scheme, which showed the generals in the foreground giving orders, a ‘recipe’, writing that: To satisfy the need for unity, which is one of the first obligations of art, the battle painters, not believing, if not in the possibility, at least in the artistic usefulness of showing strategic lines of an army corps, or simple aligned battalions, have come to adopt a banal combination, consisting of placing the dead and wounded in the foreground, a broken cannon carriage, then, as the principal group, some soldiers, or two or three riders battling, or even better, a general giving orders, and in the background the smoke of the musketry and artillery. The recipe given, it is no more than a question of varying the arrangements. But, just as one gets bored with the academic battles in the low-relief style of Trajan’s column, one is tired of this other fake and banal system.70 Placing the high command in the foreground, as Vernet, Lami and Bellangé had done, was thus understood by Du Pays as a twisting of historical truth, and therefore fake. In regard to the representation of the Battle of the Alma, this formula also meant that the decisive moment of battle was omitted. In the 1850s, only Gustave Doré, not painting to a commission, focused on Bosquet’s division and the zouaves’ decisive attack at the Battle of the Alma. Bataille de l’Alma: Attaque de la colonne du général Bosquet was exhibited at the Salon of 1855, but its whereabouts are unknown. We can only reconstruct its appearance and qualities from a print and the criticism.71 Perrier marvelled: M. Gustave Doré, who also painted a Battle of the Alma, conceived his subject in a completely different manner. He represented only the attack of General

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commented: ‘As to the Russians, they are behind the canvas.’ (Pour les Russes, ils sont derrière la toile.) La Gavinie, ‘Salon de 1857’, La Lumière no. 28 (11 July 1857), 110. ‘Pour satisfaire au besoin d’unité, qui est une des premières obligations de l’art, les peintres de batailles, ne croyant pas, sinon à la possibilité, du moins à la convenance artistique de montrer les lignes stratégiques d’un corps d’armée, ou de simples bataillons alignés, en étaient venus à adopter une combinaison banale, consistant à placer sur le premier plan quelques morts ou blessés, un affût de canon brisé, puis, comme groupe principal, quelques soldats, ou deux ou trois cavaliers aux prises, ou mieux encore, un général donnant des ordres, et dans le lointain la fumée de la mousqueterie ou de l’artillerie. La recette donnée, il ne s’agissait plus que de varier les arrangements. Mais, de même qu’on s’était fatigué des batailles académiques dans le style bas-relief de la colonne Trajane, on se lassa de cet autre système mensonger et banal.’ A.-J. Du Pays, ‘Salon de 1859: Tableaux de batailles’, L’Illustration 33, no. 850 (11 June 1859), 414. The Departement des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, owns a print of the painting (Inv. AA-4 / Doré).

The failure of traditional compositions in depictions of the Battle of the Alma

Bosquet’s division. The fierce fighting between the zouaves and the Russians gave him an opportunity to oppose the furie française with the force of resistance of an enemy worthy of us.72 Addressing Doré directly, Edmond About saw in Doré’s work a new solution, of focussing on the common soldier and, by extension, on the people as the heroes of the war: Your Bataille de l’Alma is an original work. All the history painters place the general surrounded by his military staff in the foreground: the smoke, the soldiers and the dust moving in chaos in the background. But you, you have had the original and generous idea of conceiving a battle of soldiers. It is in the same spirit in which M. Michelet wrote his history of France, relegating the princes to the background of the painting, and giving the place of honour to the real heroes, the people.73 Doré continued to focus on the common soldier in his second painting of a Crimean War battle, Bataille d’Inkermann, 5 novembre 1854 (Pl. 7). Following Doré’s success, the Ministère d’État had commissioned the young artist to paint Inkerman for Versailles, to be exhibited first at the Salon of 1857.74 The battle that Doré was asked to portray entered the annals of history as a ‘battle of soldiers’.75 Surprised by the Russians, the high command played only a minor role in this battle, which was again won due to Bosquet’s zouave division, saving the beleaguered British at their position on the Inkerman heights. It was again their relentless training from Algeria that enabled the zouaves to 72

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‘M. Gustave Doré, qui a fait aussi une Bataille de l’Alma, a conçu son sujet d’une tout autre manière. Il n’a représenté que l’attaque de la colonne du général Bosquet. La lutte acharnée des zouaves et des Russes lui a fourni l’occasion d’opposer à la furie française la force de résistance d’un ennemi digne de nous.’ Perrier, 1 July 1855, 117. ‘Votre Bataille de l’Alma est une œuvre originale. Tous les peintres d’histoire installent au premier plan un général entouré de son état-major: la fumée, les soldats et la poussière s’agitent pêle-mêle dans le fond. Pour vous, vous avez eu l’idée originale et généreuse de faire une bataille de soldats. C’est dans le même esprit que M. Michelet a écrit l’histoire de France, reléguant les princes au fond du tableau, et donnant la place d’honneur au héros véritable, le peuple.’ About, 1858, 193–194. Claire Constans, Catalogue des peintures: Musée national du château de Versailles, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995), cat. 1352. ‘It is indeed the physiognomy of the days of Inkerman and Traktir that are, to be precise, battles of soldiers. Let’s add that, since the beginning of each of them, the allies are surprised. The knowledge of the commander-in-chief only finds few or no occasions to put itself into practice.’ (C’est bien la physionomie des journées d’Inkermann et de Traktir qui sont, à proprement parler, des batailles de soldats. Ajoutons que, dès le début de chacune d’elles, les Alliés sont surpris. La science du général en chef ne trouve que peu ou point d’occasions de s’exercer.) Frédéric Canonge, Histoire militaire contemporaine: 1854–1871, vol. 1 (Paris: Charpentier, 1882), 104–105.

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fight in the low visibility of an especially foggy Crimean day. It is the gloominess pervading the square format of Doré’s painting that first arrests our attention. In the foreground, taking up the lower half of the canvas, the three armies clash as three triangles pointing towards the centre of the canvas: the Russians in their grey uniforms coming from the left; the British in bright red under attack from the left and saved from the right in the central triangle pointing downwards; the French in blue jackets, red trousers and képis storming into battle from the right. In the centre but also at other points this perfect triangular composition is interrupted by man-to-man combat. Only the centre of the canvas is lit, revealing the British being slaughtered by the Russians. The scene in the lower left corner where a Russian grabs the neck of a British soldier and strikes out with his bayonet for the final deathblow is repeated in a similar fashion across the left half of the canvas. At the lower right corner, we look at the heads of the zouaves from a perfect bird’s-eye view, seeing only their képis from above and their noses protruding underneath. As if the depicted scene were arranged on a round ball, the viewpoint is lowered towards the middle ground. Here, the white backs of the horses stand out in the middle ground of the right picture margin where the high command is located.76 Finally, in the background and dominating the upper half of the picture plane, the silhouettes of the Inkerman heights stand out against the black sky and the grey clouds, providing a dramatic setting for the turmoil in the foreground. An excerpt from Bazancourt’s official war account appeared as the notice historique of Doré’s Inkerman in the 1860 catalogue of Versailles, and confirmed the impression of dramatic anarchy, suggesting that this not only characterised Doré’s artistic translation but that this chaos was characteristic of the historical event itself: This is not at all a battle where military strategy comes into play, where the commander’s expert eye can conceive a clever manoeuvre that changes the face of things and secures the victory that had been f loating between the two parties. The élan, the force, the courage are the masters of the situation […]. This chaos, which lasted more than seven hours, defies all descriptions and all analyses. Acts of heroism, fierce man-to-man combat, discouraged rallying, desperate attacks in the ravines, in the underwood; this is Inkerman!77

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Generals Wimpffen, Canrobert, Bosquet and d’Autemare are among the higher-ranking generals who can only barely be made out in the painting. See Charles Perrier, L’art français au Salon de 1857: Peinture, sculpture, architecture (Paris, 1857), 58. ‘Ce n’est point une bataille où la stratégie militaire peut agir, où le coup d’œil exercé du chef peut concevoir une habile manœuvre qui change la face des choses et ramène la victoire flottante entre les deux parties. L’élan, la force, le courage, sont les maîtres de la situation […]. Cette mêlée, qui dura plus de sept heures, défie toutes les descriptions et toutes les analyses. Actes d’héroïsme, terribles combats corps à corps, ralliements découragés, attaques désespérées dans les ravins, dans les broussailles; voilà Inkermann!’ Eudore Soulié,

The failure of traditional compositions in depictions of the Battle of the Alma

Fig. 23:  Salvator Rosa, Bataille héroïque, 1652, oil on canvas, 214 × 351 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

One can argue that the very indescribability of the event allowed Doré to devise a composition that f louted exact legibility and instead laid the focus on the artistic ensemble. The formal language endowed Doré’s painting with a poetic quality, which historicised this event of contemporary history. The artist had understood the battle in its entirety rather than as individual portraits, grouping together the soldiers as clashing masses. Undistracted by details, the viewer could, as Perrier put it, ‘easily grasp the ensemble at first sight’.78 This summarising impression was further aided by the high viewpoint, which About identified as that of the high command.79 The composition thus corresponding to the academic principles of history painting, it reminded Perrier

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Notice du Musée Impérial de Versailles, premier étage, vol. 2 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, 1860), 89. ‘The composition of this painting is at the same time very simple and quite complicated: simple, as one easily grasps the ensemble at first sight; complicated because of the multiple elements that play a part here.’ (La composition de ce tableau est à la fois très-simple et assez compliquée: simple, en ce qu’on embrasse facilement l’ensemble d’un seul coup d’œil; compliquée, en raison des éléments multiples qui y concourent.) Perrier, 1857, 58. About likewise pointed out that Doré had understood the battle more generally, not in its details, and noted that this accorded with the viewpoint of a general, rather than that of a ‘sous-officier’. About, 1858, 345. ‘Il a considéré l’action dans ses masses et non dans ses détails; il s’est mis au point de vue des généraux et non des sous-officiers.’ About, 1858, 345.

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of Salvator Rosa’s œuvre.80 In Rosa’s seventeenth-century Bataille héroïque (Fig. 23), two opposing armies also clash in the centre of the foreground, surrounded by dramatic clouds and a chain of hills in the background as in Doré’s painting. In the year Doré’s painting was on display at the Salon, Gautier used, among others, Salvator Rosa’s Bataille héroïque to exemplify the gap between art and historical truthfulness, arguing that the painting, showing an imagined battle, had sacrificed the latter in favour of the former.81 Doré’s Bataille d’Inkermann illustrated a battle that was characteristically intangible, which meant that the lack of historical exactitude did not affect the perceived historical accuracy of the painting. On the contrary, its formal language suggested the battle could have happened at any point in history. Both Perrier and About found that the composition, the man-to-man combat and the prevailing gloominess made this battle seem as if it were set in ancient times.82 About observed: ‘This is history.’83 The painting formed a welcome contrast to Vernet’s trompe-l’œil in that it was, Perrier observed, more gruesome than in reality but nevertheless conveyed a ‘vérité locale’, which made the action clearly comprehensible.84 The painting was not finished in time for the Salon but, after a long correspondence, Doré nonetheless received the right to exhibit it in its unfinished state.85 Not only was it a ‘giant sketch’ as Gautier called it, but it was also hung so high that it was impossible for the Salon visitor to recognise the figures.86 When the painting was finally finished and hung at the Salle de Crimée in Versailles it would have been possible for the viewer to identify the high command in the middle ground of the canvas more easily but, even then, the painting was dedicated

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Perrier, 1857, 58. ‘Since the famous mosaic, which, one believes, represents the Battle of the Arbelle, art has often tried to resolve this problem, without success, militarily speaking […]; the famous battle by Salvator Rosa has nothing historical: it is an imaginary combat against unknown enemies in which the painter has invested all of his ferocity and all of his savagery.’ (Depuis la fameuse mosaïque qu’on croit représenter la bataille d’Arbelles, l’art a souvent tenté de résoudre ce problème, et il n’y a pas réussi, militairement parlant […]; la célèbre bataille de Salvator Rosa n’a rien d’historique: c’est un combat imaginaire d’ennemis inconnus où le peintre a mis toute sa férocité et toute sa sauvagerie.) Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1857 (XIX)’, L’Artiste 2, no. 10 (7 November 1857), 145. Perrier, 1857, 59; About, 1858, 346. ‘C’est de l’histoire.’ About, 1858, 345. ‘It is here that, in a wave more terrifying than reality, French, English and Russians rush about, confront each other, stifle each other, overwhelm each other, fighting man-to-man and disputing the terrain foot by foot.’ (C’est là que dans une vague plus effrayante que la réalité, Français, Anglais et Russes se pressent, se heurtent, s’étouffent, se culbutent, s’étreignent corps à corps et se disputent le terrain pied à pied.) Perrier, 1857, 58–59. ‘Vérité locale’, Perrier, 1857, 57. For Doré’s letters on this matter, see Archives des musées nationaux P30 dossier Doré. On the painting’s state of a sketch, see Gautier 7 November 1857, 145. On the fact that the painting hung too high, see Louis Auvray, Exposition des beaux-arts: Salon de 1857 (Paris: Au bureau de L’Europe artiste, 1857), 41.

The failure of traditional compositions in depictions of the Battle of the Alma

to the soldiers. Instead of focussing on details of uniforms to characterise the soldiers, as Vernet would have done, the painting brings out the vigour of the zouaves rushing into battle as their outstanding characteristic; as About put it, ‘The zouave runs towards fire as to a feast; he amuses himself and shows off his battle gaiety.’87 Perrier, too, saw the ancient notion of furia francese connected with the French élan of fighting embodied in these zouaves who saved the British soldiers.88 Despite the carnage that dominates the picture plane, the critic felt the painting conveyed the human side of battle and saw in it a successful rendering of the ‘bataille des soldats’, which the Battle of Inkerman came to be known as.89 While this aspect of the painting may have been historically accurate, the composition and dramatic lighting at the same time endowed the zouaves’ achievements with a transcendental meaning. Edmond About saw in Doré’s painting an apotheosis of the zouave.90 Doré’s centre-staging of the common soldiers seems to have been welcomed both because of its historical accuracy and as social critique, as demonstrated by the equally successful rendering of the high command in Pils’ Le débarquement de l’armée française en Crimée (Pl. 8). This latter painting was unanimously judged the best military painting at the Salon of 1857 on account of its demonstration of vérité. It shows the landing of the French troops north of Sevastopol in the Russian town of Evpatoria and its bay, Kalamita Bay, on 14 September 1855. The key regiments of the French army and the high command are portrayed on a sandy beach. On the left, the leaders of the infantry divi87 88

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‘Le zouave court au feu comme à la fête; il s’en donne à cœur joie et arbore sa gaité de bataille,’ About, 1858, 344. ‘Furia francese […] Italian expression that signifies Furie française. The expression was used in Italy to denote the impetuosity of the French during battles. Gilbert Cousin indicated that the origin of this Italian expression is a remark made by Caesar and some other historians, that “the inhabitants of Gaul have always been more than men at war, especially in the first encounters”. But Aristotle had already given the name of Celtic audacity to this fearlessness that made one rush into danger while playing with one’s life.’ (Furia francese […] – mots ital. qui signif. Furie française. Expression dont on se sert en Italie pour exprimer l’impétuosité des Français dans les combats. Gilbert Cousin a donné pour origine à cette expression italienne la remarque faite par César et par quelques autres historiens, que ‘les habitants des Gaules ont toujours été à la guerre plus que des hommes, surtout dans le premier choc’. Mais Aristote donne déjà le nom d’audace celtique à cette intrépidité qui fait qu’on se précipite dans le danger en se jouant de la vie.) Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol.  8, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1872), s. v. ‘Furia francese.’ ‘Despising for a reason the traditional patterns of the battles in fashion, for which the paintings by Horace Vernet are the models, G. Doré made a painting, not exclusively reserved for the pompous military staff, but a real battle of soldiers, where all who have contributed to the victory have their place.’ (Méprisant avec raison le poncis traditionnel des batailles à la mode, dont les toiles d’Horace Vernet sont le type achevé, G. Doré a fait de son tableau, non pas une galerie exclusivement réservée à un pompeux état-major, mais une véritable bataille de soldats, où tous ceux qui ont concouru à la victoire ont leur place.) Perrier, 1857, 57. About, 1858, 345.

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sions are grouped around Marshal Saint-Arnaud who is shown seated, pointing and looking towards the left picture margin, displaying his semi-profile. Clockwise from Saint-Arnaud are his chef d’état-major, sitting on the ground, a map on his left knee, and General Canrobert in red trousers and a bicorne hat standing in front of Generals Bosquet and Forey, both on horseback.91 To the left of the main group, a colonel of the zouaves is mounted on an agitated grey horse; the figure on horseback behind him can be identified by the striking short red jacket with black embroidery as an officer of the light cavalry regiment of the spahis, a detachment mainly recruited from Algeria and serving as personal escort of Saint-Arnaud during the Crimean War. The principal figure of the painting is the commissioner, Prince Napoleon, standing to the right of the group almost in the centre of the painting in white trousers, his right hand tucked into his jacket in Napoleonic fashion. An arrangement of shovels and picks, the tools of the long siege of Sevastopol, in front of the high command and a chariot denote French military logistics. The right of the picture is dominated by groups of soldiers in black uniforms, the specialist light infantry regiment of the chasseurs à pied. The men are relaxed. Closest to the centre of the painting, a kneeling soldier, trumpet and rif le strapped to his back, is inspecting his white knapsack. Behind him, a chasseur with red kepi bends forward to light his cigarette from the pipe of his comrade sitting to his left. In front of the group, a rif le, a water canteen, another knapsack and a trumpet form a still life. The same still life can be found at the right-hand side of the painting, behind which a group of soldiers is resting on the ground. The other chasseurs standing behind this seated group are equally relaxed, some leaning on their bayonet rif les, others sitting on them. This informal group is contrasted with the mounted cavalry in the centre middle ground, the marching zouaves in the right middle ground and the three generals on horseback in the right background, who oversee the landing from a raised position. The ships that dot the sea in the background complete this image of the allied invasion of the Crimea, accentuated by the French f lag in the right background. One might argue that, although the landing in the Crimea took place long before the first battle in the Crimea, Pils’ Le débarquement is nevertheless an image of victory. It was an easily earned victory over the Russians, who had not opposed the allies’ landing;92 furthermore, in contrast to the disorganised British troops, who took five days to disembark, the French troops prided themselves on their smooth arrival, which took only one day.93 The image could therefore also be read as a triumph of the French over the British in a competitive spirit that would become notorious for the rest

91 92 93

The figures are identified in Napoléon: La collection napoléonienne de la Cité impériale, ed. Odile Bianco, exh. cat., Musée Fesch, Ajaccio (Ajaccio: Freppel Edac, 2005), cat. 38. Art critics also picked up on the fact that the landing had taken place without any encounter with the enemy. See for example Gautier, 7 November 1857, 146. Figes, 2010, 204.

The failure of traditional compositions in depictions of the Battle of the Alma

of the war. The display of ease is therefore central to understanding the message of the painting. While his soldiers are lying on the ground, smoking and chatting, even the leader of the French troops, Saint-Arnaud, is portrayed sitting at leisure on a chair on the beach.94 However, since the picture was commissioned by Prince Napoleon who was in need of restoring his reputation after he had left the theatre of war prematurely, one could argue that the painting was primarily intended to ensure a victory over public opinion, showing the prince in the midst of this successful first step on Russian soil. The painting was received enthusiastically both by the Jury des récompenses, who awarded it a First Class Medal, and by the critics. The latter liked the way in which the painting conveyed that, as Planche put it, Pils had added ‘thought to the testimony of the eyes’.95 The artist was praised for having captured the essence of the French presence in a foreign country far away from home.96 The clear arrangement of the groups, critics noted, resulted in an immediate legibility and accounted for grande vérité and mouvement.97 The physiognomies and postures of the figures were perceived as strikingly natural, revealing their âme or soul, as opposed to the purely physical resemblance in costume familiar to contemporaries from Vernet’s paintings.98 The natural handling of each soldier had an effect probably not welcomed by the commissioner of the painting, as it distracted the attention away from the main figures.99 Critics marvelled at the liveliness of the anonymous soldiers of the chasseurs de Vincennes; Gautier wrote: ‘The group of chasseurs de Vincennes in the foreground is remarkable because of the familiar vérité in their attitudes caught in the very act. No pomposity, no posing.’100 Montaiglon’s statement that the ‘physiognomy of the soldiers is captured with a vivid comprehension of vérité’ confirms that it was indeed the figures that conveyed the notion of vérité, a notion which seems f luid.101 This is suggested by the fact that critics qualified the term in relation to Pils’ canvas, attributing to it a ‘vérité familière’,102 ‘grande véri  94

  95   96   97   98

  99

100

101 102

In the painting, there is furthmore a newspaper lying next to the general’s chair. SaintArnaud is indeed said to have been reading a newspaper in a chair on the beach, watching the British disembark. See Figes, 2010, 204. ‘ajouter la pensée au témoignage des yeux.’ Planche, 15 July 1857, 388. About, 1858, 332–333. Auvray, 1857, 14; Planche, 15 July 1857, 387. ‘M. Pils gave thoughts and soul to the soldier of whom one usually only made a prankster.’ (M. Pils a donné de la pensée et de l’âme au soldat dont on ne fait habituellement qu’un loustic.) Gautier, 7 November 1857, 146. ‘M. Pils […] ensured that Prince Napoleon, the Duc of Cambridge, Marshal Saint-Arnaud, etc., did not capture alone the attention of the spectator.’ (M. Pils […] a fait en sorte que le prince Napoléon, le duc de Cambridge, le maréchal de Saint-Arnaud, etc., ne captivassent pas à eux seuls l’attention du spectateur.) Perrier, 1857, 69. ‘Le groupe des chasseurs de Vincennes, au premier plan, est remarquable pour la vérité familière des attitudes prises sur le fait. Nulle emphase, nulle pose.’ Gautier, 7 November 1857, 146. Anatole de Montaiglon, ‘Salon de 1857’, Revue universelle des arts 5 (September 1857), 537. Gautier, 7 November 1857, 146.

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té’,103 ‘vérité des attitudes’,104 ‘une vérité’,105 ‘compréhension de la vérité’,106 ‘la vérité a du charme’107 and ‘une vérité étonnante’.108 Planche noted about the painting: ‘There is in the Débarquement des troupes a movement, a vérité, which makes this canvas a work worthy of attention.’109 These qualities and the informal portrayal of the French army stand out especially in comparison to a painting of the same subject and of a similar composition that the government commissioned from Félix Barrias for the Salle de Crimée in Versailles (Pl. 9). The soldiers here form ordered groups of a military parade with Saint-Arnaud as the central figure on horseback, waving his bicorne hat towards them.110 Critics rejected the formality of Barrias’ painting, as can be seen in this passage pointing out the difference in effect of the two paintings: I have nothing to say about the painting by M. Barrias, representing the Débarquement de l’armée française en Crimée: it is of a nullity that disarms. On the other hand, it has been difficult to forget the canvas by M. Pils, representing the same subject and exhibited at the last Salon. One remembers the prompt and clear movement of this landing army, the smoothness with which it put into order its scattered members, the admirable group of chasseurs à pied, whose young figures so bravely showed élan and war-like insouciance in the face of the unknown: this was painting with bare steel, the military style at its most lively.111 Yet, even the conferring of vérité on Pils could not reinsert his military subject back into the high art canon of history painting, and the critic Calonne stated: ‘Le Débarquement en Crimée is, strictly speaking, not a history painting […] but it is the best painting 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

111

Auvray, 1857, 14. Verne, 1857, 251. Planche, 15 July 1857, 387. Montaiglon, September 1857, 537. Eugène Loudun, Le Salon de 1857 (Paris: Jules Tardieu, 1857), 16. Perrier, 1857, 69. ‘Il y a dans le Débarquement des troupes un mouvement, une vérité, qui font de ce tableau un ouvrage très digne d’attention.’ Planche, 15 July 1857, 388. Pils’ and Barrias’ paintings are probably equally ‘realistic’ but are nevertheless different in their message by a different choice of moment – the scene depicted in Barrias’ painting took place one hour after the scene depicted in Pils’ painting. ‘Je n’ai rien à dire du tableau de M. Barrias, représentant le Débarquement de l’armée française en Crimée: il est d’une nullité qui désarme. Il était difficile d’ailleurs de faire oublier la toile de M. Pils, représentant le même sujet et exposée au dernier Salon. On se souvient du mouvement prompt et net de cette armée débarquée, de la souplesse avec laquelle elle débrouillait ses membres épars, de cet admirable groupe de chasseurs à pied, dont les jeunes figures peignaient si bravement l’élan vers l’inconnu et la martiale insouciance: c’était de la peinture à l’armée blanche, le style militaire à son degré le plus vif.’ Paul de Saint-Victor, ‘Salon de 1859’, La Presse (18 June 1859).

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles

of the military genre that we have seen in a long time.’112 Critics further argued that, by not showing an actual battle, Pils had avoided the difficulties painters of battles usually encounter when having to choose one decisive moment to depict.113 How to imbue a battle with historical truthfulness continued to be an urgent question when critics analysed military paintings of the Crimean War. As we have seen, in the early paintings of the Alma battle, the pictorial focus on the high command created a gap between historical truth and art. Edmond About’s advice for military painters, to show the commander-in-chief in the middle of the battle, was hard to fulfil when painting the Crimean battles, in which the strategies planned by the generals were only rarely put into practice.114 The focus on the high command and on the deeds of common soldiers within the same painting conf licted with the depiction of historical truth. Not only did the actors of war seem to have to be commemorated in different canvases – as in Doré’s and Pils’ paintings – but the long stretches of inactivity during the Siege of Sevastopol and the violent clashes during the mostly unexpected battles were also difficult to capture in one image. The nature of the Crimean War seemed best conveyed in several canvases, a project that the Second Empire’s arts administration undertook in Versailles with the Salle de Crimée.

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles Between 1855 and 1861, eighteen artists, some established, others emerging, worked on forty-four paintings for the Salle de Crimée at Versailles, a large room dedicated to celebrating the recent Crimean War in paint.115 The room formed an important part of Napoleon III’s populist politics and led to innovative pictorial solutions, ushering in a new era in the genre of military painting. The room chosen for the Crimean paintings was the former Salle du Maroc in Versailles’ north wing. It was the last room of the enfilade of rooms (Fig. 24) which Louis-Philippe had asked Vernet to decorate to celebrate the July Monarchy’s Algerian conquests but which had been left unfinished at the king’s abdication. Under the Second Empire, its ceiling decorations, which displayed the scenes of the 1844 Campaign of Morocco, still bore witness to the aborted project, as one can discern in a postcard of

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‘Le Débarquement en Crimée n’est pas à proprement parler un tableau d’histoire […] mais c’est le meilleur tableau de genre militaire que nous ayons vu depuis longtemps.’ Calonne, 1 July 1857, 596–597. Auvray, 1857, 14. The depiction of the day before and after a battle formed part of the repertoire of history painting under the First Empire as Gros’ Le champ de Bataille d’Eylau demonstrates. See Prendergast, 1997, 134. About, 1858, 338. The circumstances of commission of the Salle de Crimée are discussed in Chapter II, 83ff.

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Salle de la Smalah

Salle de Constantine

Salle de Crimée

Fig. 24:  Floorplan, first floor, Musée impérial de Versailles, 1860, in: Eudore Soulié, Notice du Musée Impérial de Versailles, premier étage, vol. 2 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, 1860).

a later state of the Salle de Crimée (Fig. 25).116 The Second Empire arts administration probably chose this room because it was one of the three rooms in Versailles that could house paintings up to six metres high, the height of the intended centrepiece by Yvon. Furthermore, it continued the north wing narrative of contemporary history: in order to get to the Salle de Crimée, one had to pass through the Salle de Constantine (Fig. 26), which housed the trio of paintings by Horace Vernet of the 1837 taking of the Algerian town.117 The Salle de Crimée never existed in its entirety and was disassembled by the beginning of the twentieth century but its intended set-up can be reconstructed from a draft of an installation, which Soulié attached as a suggestion to a letter to Nieuwerkerke 116

117

Painted by Eloi-Firmin Féron (1802–1876) under the supervision of Horace Vernet, the ceiling illustrated official moments of the Morroccan Campaign. On the Salle du Maroc see Melanie Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful: Representing the Conquest of Algeria, 1830–1848 (PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2009), 101; Rapport des Musées Royaux à l’Intendant de la liste civile, 27 December 1844, Archives des musées nationaux P30; and Pierre Francastel, La création du Musée historique de Versailles et la transformation du Palais (1832–1848) d’après des documents inédits (Versailles: L. Bernard, 1930), 124. Vernet also supervised the execution of the pictorial programme where the walls and gilded ceilings formed a coherent aesthetic with the paintings.

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles

Fig. 25:  Postcard of the Salle de Crimée at Château de Versailles, Collection des Galeries Modernes, end of 19th century, print on paper.

Fig. 26:  Salle de Constantine, 1838–1839, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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in 1859 (Pl. 10).118 We can assume that Soulié’s plan had been largely put into practice by 1860, as the Versailles guide of that year lists all the paintings indicated in the plan as installed in Room 102, which was, the guide explains, meant to ‘commemorate the principal facts and figures of the Crimean expedition’.119 The guide furthermore describes the events shown in the paintings (mostly using extracts from the Salon catalogues) and lists the biographies of most of the generals represented in the portraits and the marble busts. It also notes that ‘(the room’s) installation is not completely finished’, probably because Pils’ large painting of the Battle of the Alma was not completed yet and would replace several other paintings that hung in the room in 1860.120 In the following, I will nevertheless reconstruct the installation as suggested by Soulié in his letter of 1859, as it probably came closest to the Salle de Crimée as envisaged at the outset of the project. In his plan, the curator drew the room in top view and indicated the paintings as small boxes drawn in relative size to each other, labelling them with the artists’ names and the paintings’ titles.121 Soulié’s plan roughly followed Mercey’s original 1856 concept of the Salle de Crimée, as outlined in the previous chapter:122 each of the room’s walls illustrated milestones of the Crimean War in a more or less chronological, clockwise arrangement, which follows the events of the war over two years – from the landing in the Crimea to the final victory. The narrative started on the south wall with the landing of the French troops on the Crimean peninsula, painted by Barrias (Pl. 9; Pl. 11). Next to it, the key protagonists of the beginning of the war were introduced: to the left hung a portrait of the first commander-in-chief of the French troops in the Crimea, Saint-Arnaud, and to the right a portrait of the commander of the French f leet in the Black Sea, Admiral Bru-

118 119 120

121 122

Soulié to Nieuwerkerke, letter of 28 September 1859, Archives des musées nationaux V2. ‘rappeler les principaux faits et les personnages de l’expedition de Crimée’, Soulié, 1860, vol. 2, 87. ‘mais l’arrangement n’en est pas définitivement arrêté’, Soulié, 1860, vol. 2, 87. Furthermore, the 1860 guide lists a painting not indicated in Soulié’s plan, Congrès de Paris. – Du 25 février au 30 mars 1856 by Édouard Dubufe, measuring 3.08 by 5.10 meters, confirming that Soulié’s plan should be considered provisional and not implemented in its entirety. See Soulié, 1860, vol. 2, 103. Already by 1865, the original set-up of the room had changed when Isidore Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma (Salon of 1861), 500 × 900 cm, replaced the paintings on the north wall of the room. See Guide au musée impérial de Versailles (Versailles: Brunox, 1865), 67. Probably already by the end of the 1860s but definitely by 1881, the paintings of the Italian Campaign (1859) were also hung in the Salle de Crimée, and some Crimean War paintings were moved to storage. See Clément de Ris, Notice du Musée historique de Versailles. Supplément: Rez-de-Chaussée, premier et deuxième étages, attique chimay (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, 1881), 37–42. Soulié further marked works that were not finished yet with an ‘X,’ explained in a note on the lower left margin of the document. Frédéric de Mercey to Achille Fould in 1856, Archives nationales F21/487. See Chapter II, 83ff.

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles

at.123 Both men had died early on during the war. Underneath Barrias’ painting, six small works by Durand-Brager illustrated the barren Crimean terrain surrounding Sevastopol. These small-format paintings were part of the earlier-mentioned series of twenty-one works entitled Siège de Sébastopol that illustrated military action in the Crimean terrain, and continued on two other walls of the room.124 Commissioned specifically for this room, the sizes varied according to where they came to hang, but all of Durand-Brager’s paintings were hung at the lowest level, forming a continuous strip along three walls of the room.125 According to Soulié’s 1859 plan, the room’s narrative continued on the long west wall with paintings of the events leading up to and during the Siege of Sevastopol. Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma (Fig. 47) was probably intended to hang here eventually, as this was the only wall, apart from the facing wall always meant to be occupied by Yvon’s trio, that could comfortably accommodate the large canvas. However, in the provisional plan of 1859, twelve paintings addressed subjects such as suffering, death and the battles fought during the siege, which had been favourably reported by the censored press as French victories. Here, the paintings evoked popular notions of the French doctors and nurses as a kind of substitute family for the soldiers far away from home. In Bouniol’s widely read contemporary novel of a collection of anecdotes of military life in the Crimea, À l’ombre du drapeau (1856), the Crimean nurses are compared to mothers and, by extension, France, as the mother of all the soldiers. Bouniol reported a wounded soldier as saying to one of the nurses: ‘My sister, come often; every time you enter I seem to see France and my mother.’126 Similarly, General Canrobert came to be seen as the father of the French troops, Bouniol specifically calling him ‘the father of the soldiers’.127 As the commander-in-chief who had led the siege and the battles during this period after Saint-Arnaud’s death, Canrobert was prominently displayed in the

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Charles Philippe Larivière, Portrait du maréchal Leroy de Saint-Arnaud, 1854, oil on canvas, 219 × 144 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles; Pierre François Eugène Giraud, Portrait d’Armand-Joseph, Amiral Bruat, c. 1856, oil on canvas, 215 × 140 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. On the production of Durand-Brager’s series and its exhibition at the Salon of 1857, see Katie Hornstein, Episodes in Political Illusion: The Proliferation of War Imagery in France (1804– 1856) (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2010), 275–293. Commissioned by the Civil List for 20,000 francs; see Catherine Granger, L’Empereur et les arts: La liste civile de Napoléon III (Paris: École des Chartes, 2005), 200, 352; directly commissioned by Napoleon III, according to Claire Constans, Musée national du château de Versailles: Catalogue des Peintures (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1980), cat. 1465ff. ‘Ma sœur, venez souvent; toutes les fois que vous entrez il me semble voir la France et ma mère.’ Bouniol, 1856, 302. Bouniol ‘quotes’ another soldier as saying: ‘Now that we have our sisters, we are not dying anymore.’ (À présent que nous avons nos Sœurs, nous ne mourrons plus.) Bouniol, 1856, 300. ‘le père des soldats’, Bouniol, 1856, 288.

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centre of the wall in a portrait by Horace Vernet and in a painting in the lower left corner of the wall, picturing him visiting his injured soldiers (Pl. 14).128 On either side of the portrait by Vernet, two paintings by Eugène Appert and Rigo introduced the doctors and nurses helping the wounded soldiers as key figures in the siege.129 Rigo’s Les chirurgiens français pansant des blessés russes à la bataille d’Inkermann (Salon of 1857) focuses on the deeds of the surgeon general of the French army, Dr. G. Scrive (Pl. 12). The standing figure of the doctor dominates the centre of the near-square format of the painting. The setting is a French mobile army surgical hospital, recognisable by the tent-like structures in the right background. Around Scrive, genre-like scenes of wounded Russians being examined by French doctors are arranged in a circular composition. As in Gros’ famous Eylau (Salon of 1808), this image of the French taking care of their wounded enemy evokes notions of forgiveness and clemency, stressing the supposed humanitarian and Christian aspects of the war against the ‘barbaric’ Russians.130 In contrast to Eylau, where the French doctor in the lower right corner of the painting has to force his civilising mission onto the f leeing Russian, the Russians here are pictured as devoutly submissive to the French. Annie Bardon calls the painting a ‘secularised epiphany scene’, accurately pointing out the religious nuances of the image.131 The Russian pointing heavenwards contains Christian overtones, while the light cast on the French doctors stresses the link to the French enlightenment. The nurses’ achievements are commemorated in Appert’s Les sœurs de charité (Salon of 1855; Pl. 13). This depicts three sisters attending to a French soldier and evokes similar notions as Rigo’s Les chirurgiens français but seems even more staged. The dominant colours of blue, white and red strikingly evoke the French f lag. The third painting, Rigo’s Le général en chef Canrobert, venant le matin visiter une tranchée attaquée pendant la nuit par les Russes, distribue aux blessés des encouragements et des récompenses (Salon of 1859), illustrates Canrobert’s and, by extension, France’s benevolence towards the soldiers (Pl. 14). The painting positions the viewer inside a trench covered in snow. The central figure is Canrobert in a bicorne hat; his right arm in a sling, his left hand pins a decoration onto the collar of a zouave. The zouave seems to have been lifted off a stretcher by his comrades; his head and right leg are bandaged. 128 129

130 131

Horace Vernet, Portrait en pied de S. Exe. M. le maréchal Canrobert, 1857, oil on canvas, 219 × 143 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Eugène Appert (1814–1867) was a pupil of Ingres. From the Salon of 1837, he focused on religious subjects. He was valued by the Second Empire arts administration, for which he painted the ceiling of the dining room of the Ministère d’État but no more military subjects. On Appert, see Émile Bellier de La Chavignerie and Louis Auvray, Dictionnaire général des artistes de l’école française depuis l’origine des arts du dessin jusqu’à nos jours: Architectes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et lithographes, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1882), 20. Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoléon Ier sur le champ de bataille d’Eylau le 9 février 1807, 1808, oil on canvas, 521 × 784 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Annie Bardon, Militärmalerei im Second Empire am Beispiel des Krimkrieges (PhD thesis, Universität Marburg, 1980), 122.

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles

Looking towards the trench wall, the viewer is cast in shadow and separated from the scene by a dead soldier lying in the right foreground and scattered wicker baskets blocking the rest of the foreground. A soldier halting to watch the scene from the left and a kneeling soldier in the foreground on the right are the only other figures paying attention to the scene. The other soldiers are either taking care of one another, on watch, or, in the middle ground on the left, are hit by an exploding projectile that catapults one of them towards the viewer. Although the day is gloomy, Canrobert is bathed in light emanating from an unidentifiable source on the left. The cold colours emphasise the freezing temperatures of this winter’s day. As Napoleon III had not actually fought in the Crimea, Rigo could imbue the figure of Canrobert with the same divine characteristics that Gros had attributed to Napoleon I in Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa.132 Standing with their bodies facing the viewer while touching the soldier to their left, both figures are bathed in transcendental light. The images conjure up the historical notion of the healing touch, which can be traced back to the healing touch of Christ in his miracles. In Jaffa, Napoleon I touches the wound of one of his soldiers; in Rigo’s painting, Canrobert as the healer attaches the medal to the soldier who, like the sick man in Jaffa, rises towards his leader. The gestures in the two paintings, however, have different connotations and the paintings’ propagandistic messages differed in their success. As Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby argues, Napoleon’s touch in Jaffa differs from the traditional notion of the healing king’s ‘sacred and miraculous touch’ in that it was a ‘physical action […] meant to disprove an irrational conviction that the disease was contagious’.133 Grigsby establishes that this propagandistic purpose was, however, finally subverted: some critics reviewing Jaffa interpreted Napoleon’s contact as murderous rather than healing, in the face of the emperor’s decision to leave behind and even order the poisoning of the sick when the French troops left the theatre of war.134 In contrast, the propagandistic message of Rigo’s painting was effective, Canrobert being celebrated in the French press for chivalric behaviour during the Crimean winter months. The Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France (1865) asserted that the general, in order to be close to his soldiers, set up camp at sites that were ‘the least protected against enemy fire’.135 In the context of Canrobert’s positive image with the public, the critic Lépinois picked up on the rhetoric of 132

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Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa, 1804, oil on canvas, 532 × 720 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. I borrow the comparison of Rigo’s image of Canrobert to Napoleon in Gros’ Jaffa from Bardon, 1980, 120. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, ‘Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization in Gros’s “Plague-Stricken of Jaffa” (1804)’, Representations no. 51 (Summer 1995), 9. Grigsby, Summer 1995, 27. ‘le moins à couvert des feux ennemis’, unclear but probably cited from Paul de Molènes, Les Commentaires d’un soldat. Premiers jours de la guerre de Crimée. L’hiver devant Sébastopol. Derniers jours de la guerre de Crimée. La guerre d’Italie (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1860). Victor Duruy, Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France, vol. 3 (Paris: Hachette, 1865), 160.

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the healing touch, noting: ‘That cross will heal the wound of the poor soldier; the general is a great surgeon.’136 Appert’s and Rigo’s metaphorical paintings succeeded in portraying Dr. Scrive, General Canrobert and the nurses as convincingly heroic. The rest of the west wall displayed several battles that had interrupted the long wait in the trenches. The large canvas in the centre of the lower tier illustrated the Battle of Balaklava where the French had rescued their British allies from a Russian attack (Pl. 15). The author of this painting, Antoine Valentin Jumel de Noireterre, was an employee of the Dépôt de la Guerre. More interested in documenting the exact positions of the battalions and layout of the battlefield, he presented the battle in a distancing overview. As in the watercolours by Jumel’s colleague in the Dépôt de la Guerre, Théodore Jung, the commanding overview attempts to suggest order and control over the military operations.137 Baudelaire, when discussing this genre’s presence at the Salon of 1859, acknowledged the truthfulness but denied it the status of art: A real battle is not a picture; for, in order to be intelligible, and consequently interesting as a battle, it can only be represented in the form of black, white or blue lines, which stand for the battalions drawn up. In a composition of this kind, no less than in reality, the terrain becomes more important than the men. But in such conditions there is no picture left, or at least there is only a picture of tactics and topography.138 To enlarge these compositions to the degree of Jumel’s Balaklava results in a powerful decontextualisation, introducing the unquestioned truthfulness of the specialised perspective drawings into a Salon and, later, a museum context. Balaklava and, hanging next to it on the left, Bataille de Traktir (Salon of 1857), also by Jumel, retrospectively endow the undeniably chaotic Crimean War with an air of order and strategy.139 The brutality of the bloody battles fought during the siege, which had led to outcries among the French public due to the high number of casualties, featured in one 136

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‘Cette croix va cicatriser la blessure du pauvre soldat; le général est un grand chirurgien.’ Eugène Louis Ernest de Buchère de Lépinois, L’art dans la rue et l’art au Salon (Paris: Dentu, 1859), 172; cited and discussed in Bardon, 1980, 120. See for example Théodore Jung, Bataille d’Inkermann (5 novembre 1854), c. 1854, watercolour on paper, 57 × 95 cm, Musée de l’Armée, Paris. ‘Une bataille vraie n’est pas un tableau; car, pour être intelligible et conséquemment intéressante comme bataille, elle ne peut être représentée que par des lignes blanches, bleues ou noires, simulant les bataillons en ligne. Le terrain devient, dans une composition de ce genre comme dans la réalité, plus important que les hommes. Mais, dans de pareilles conditions, il n’y a plus de tableau, ou du moins, il n’y a qu’un tableau de tactique et de topographie.’ Baudelaire in 1859. See Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1859’, in Critique d’art suivi de Critique musicale, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 302. Antoine Valentin Jumel de Noireterre, Bataille de Traktir, 1857, oil on canvas, 129.4 × 300.8 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles

painting only: Attaque et prise, le 7 juin 1855, du Mamelon-Vert et des Ouvrages-Blancs (Salon of 1859) by Protais, hung in the upper left corner of the long wall (Pl. 16). The painting depicted the French taking of the Russian defence structure, the Mamelon Vert, a sensitive topic in the press as this action had led to a bloodbath among the French, when Russian artillery fire had mowed down 7,500 Frenchmen after General Pélissier had overslept during a planned attack on the Russians.140 The battle was eventually successful, thanks again to the zouaves’ training and Bosquet’s leadership.141 In this painting, the viewer is hovering above the scene, surveying vast areas of the terrain as in the topographical paintings by Jumel. However, the French soldiers are placed close to the picture plane and are clearly recognisable. Some of them are depicted sinking to the ground as they are hit by the incessant hail of Russian artillery fire. That critics were aware that the artist had witnessed the attack on the Mamelon Vert might explain why they did not dispute the historical accuracy of the painting, which was designated in the Salon catalogue as ‘after a drawing executed by the author, during the operation’.142 Critics observed that the painting contained non-artistic or ‘extra-pittoresque’ aspects, only showing soldiers from the back, which was considered to emphasise its historical truthfulness.143 Du Pays pointed out that the painting was suitable for the display in Versailles but denied it any artistic qualities on the grounds of its resemblance to topographical or strategic painting: There is without a doubt a lot of vérité in the manner in which the painter represented the two attacking columns rushing toward the redoubt. This is a painting that could be interesting for the Musée de Versailles; but it is at the same time one of the best examples to cite the extra-picturesque conditions to which strategic paintings can be subject. In this military action the rule is that no figure faces the spectator; all are seen from the back; the painting is a marquetry panel of red trousers. Make an artwork out of this!144 140 141 142

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Figes, 2010, 363. Figes, 2010, 363. ‘D’après un dessin pris par l’auteur, pendant l’action’, Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 15 avril 1859 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1859), cat. 2218. For example, Dumesnil noted in his Salon review of Protais’ painting that it depicted ‘reality’, Henri Dumesnil, Le Salon de 1859 (Paris: Jules Renouard. Éditeur de l’Histoire des Peintres de toutes les écoles, 1859), 153. Du Pays, 11 June 1859, 414. ‘Il y a sans doute beaucoup de vérité dans la manière dont ce peintre a représenté les deux colonnes d’attaque courant vers la redoute. C’est là un tableau qui peut avoir son intérêt pour le musée de Versailles; mais c’est en même temps un des meilleurs exemples à citer des conditions extrapittoresques auxquelles les peintures stratégiques peuvent être assujetties. Dans cette action militaire la donnée est telle qu’aucune des figures ne fait face au spectateur; toutes sont vues de dos; le tableau est une marqueterie de fonds de pantalons rouges. Faites une œuvre d’art de cela!’ Du Pays, 11 June 1859, 414.

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In its unprecedentedly brutal recording of soldiers shot down by enemy fire, the painting stands out among the works commissioned for Versailles. The critic Duvivier picked up on this grim portrayal of the war, recalling that Protais had ‘seen in person the horror of these amputations of humanity’.145 On this long wall, Protais’ painting remained the only one to directly address the subject of killing of French soldiers, functioning as a memorial of the soldiers’ sacrifice in the Crimea. To the right of this long wall, on the short north wall opposite the entrance doors, hung Bataille d’Inkermann, Gustave Doré’s arresting image of the clash of nations on a large square format discussed above (Pl. 7). With its painterly expression and strong colours, it contrasted with the eclectic and chaotic mix of the long wall and suggested the notion of the heroic struggle within one powerful image. Flanking it were, among others, a portrait by Horace Vernet of General Bosquet (Fig. 45), who had become a celebrated hero by 1860 for his brave leadership of his famous zouave regiment, and Protais’ painting of the taking of the Mamelon Vert (Fig. 20), the sketch of which he had previously published in the press.146 On this wall, the earlier mentioned series of the Crimean terrain by Durand-Brager, which was not displayed on the long wall, was now continued (Pl. 11). In the following, I will draw on Katie Hornstein’s crucial insights about the production of Durand-Brager’s series and its exhibition at the Salon. Our accounts differ in that my emphasis is on the series’ innovative effects on the spectator experience and its ultimate function in the context of the Salle de Crimée. Although Soulié did not indicate the titles of Durand-Brager’s paintings on his plan, we can nevertheless suppose, from the size of the boxes he drew and the paintings’ relative sizes, which subjects might have hung where. Although they had been specifically commissioned to fit the Salle de Crimée, the government only bought Durand-Brager’s paintings after the Salon. This was due to the fact that commissioned paintings under the Second Empire were only officially purchased from the artists after they had been exhibited at the Salon. As Soulié indicated only two long boxes in the plan, the two largest of Durand-Brager’s

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‘étudié de visu l’horreur d’une de ces amputations de l’humanité’, J.-H. Duvivier, Salon de 1859: Indiscrétions (Paris: Dentu, 1859), 7. Other paintings hanging on the North Wall were: Henri Rodakowski, Aimable-Jean-Jacques Pélissier, Duc de Malakoff, Maréchal de France, 1857, oil on canvas, 230 × 145 cm; Antoine-Jules Duvaux, Épisode de l’assaut de Sébastopol (8 septembre 1855), 1857, oil on canvas, 120 × 188 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. This wall looked different in 1860. The portrait of Pélissier by Rodakowski, which Soulié indicated on his 1859 plan for this wall, does not appear in the Versailles catalogue of 1860. Instead, Édouard Dubufe’s Congrès de Paris du 25 février au 30 mars 1856 (Salon of 1857), which depicts the peace conference following the Crimean War and was not indicated in Soulié’s 1859 plan, is listed in the 1860 Versailles catalogue. At a size of 3 by 5.10 metres, it probably did not hang on this wall, reminding us that the Salle de Crimée may have looked different in 1860 from Soulié’s original plan. See Soulié, 1860, vol. 2, 103.

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles

canvases can only have hung on the east wall, underneath Yvon’s two Malakoff paintings (Pl. 25, Pl. 26) that f lanked the centrepiece: Prise de Malakoff. Durand-Brager’s Panorama des attaques de gauche, pris de l’observatoire du maréchal Canrobert (Pl. 17) and Panorama des attaques de gauche; vue prise de l’extrême gauche des attaques (Pl. 18) are picturesque views of the Crimean war zone, and included the sites illustrated in Yvon’s paintings.147 The apparent calm of these landscape paintings formed the backdrop to the human drama unfolding in the paintings by Yvon. Flanking each of these wide canvases were two smaller formats of the same height, adding up to four small views by Durand-Brager on this wall (Pl. 11).148 It is helpful here to turn to Katie Hornstein’s analysis of the series’ production and presence at the Salon of 1857. She has established that the smaller formats of the series are in fact contained in the larger ones, focusing on (grim) details of the siege.149 Hornstein rightly observes that the tiny figures of soldiers displayed in the smaller paintings such as Le Clocheton (Pl. 19) are ‘a far cry from the heroic masses of French soldiers that audiences had come to expect from battle paintings’.150 Dispersed over the barren Crimean landscape in the foreground, some are depicted carrying away their comrades on stretchers; one soldier is hobbling towards the foreground on crutches. Cannonballs that are scattered over the terrain and puffs of white gun smoke further remind the viewer that these soldiers were continuously exposed to danger. However, the hovering viewpoint and the fact that the depicted figures are so small distance the viewer from this inescapable situation of danger commemorated by the painting. Hornstein notes that some of the other small paintings focus on the ‘destruction of the landscape’, such as Les entonnoirs (Pl. 20); this depicts the impact of an artillery fire exchange of the opposing armies, which has left the earth black and craggy.151 All one sees here is wasteland where human signs are reduced to yellow fire behind clumps of earth. Similarly, in Ranvin des Anglais and Face droite du bastion du Mât (Pl. 21) the torn, dry physicality of the Crimean surface dominates the canvases, letting the bleakness of the terrain stand for the inescapable danger of death.152

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For an identification of the sites in Durand-Brager’s paintings, see exhibition catalogue entry on Durand-Brager in Le XIXe siècle, exh. cat., Galerie Talabardon & Gautier, Paris, 5–31 December 2008 (Paris: Imprimerie en Belgique, 2008). Durand-Brager painted fourteen of these small views, and it is consequently impossible to know from Soulié’s unlabelled ‘boxes’ which ones hung where. To make this clear in my illustrations of the Salle de Crimée, I have used the same painting for all areas where DurandBrager’s small paintings where indicated in Soulié’s plan. Hornstein, 2010, 277. Hornstein, 2010, 286. Hornstein, 2010, 285. Henri Durand-Brager, Ravin des Anglais, 1857, oil on canvas, 56 × 88 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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Fig. 27:  Henri Durand-Brager, ‘Correspondance de Crimée’, L’Illustration 24, no. 62 (13 January 1855), 24–25.

In contrast, Durand-Brager’s larger formats romanticise the Crimea, showing it in a distancing overview. On the north wall, two more of his landscape overviews f lanked Doré’s painting.153 The Panorama de Kamiesch (Pl. 22) depicts the French harbour of Kamiesch from the mainland, bathed in romantically tinted pink light, while Panorama de Sébastopol represents the Russian harbour of Sevastopol seen from the calm sea.154 Below Doré’s painting, three 120-centimetre-long views by Durand-Brager were dedicated to the French penetration of the Crimea: one shows the French ship Le Roland entering the bay of Strelitzka while the other two depict French bastions close to Sevastopol, broaching the issue of French presence on Crimean soil.155 Finally, on

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Only these two paintings are 98 centimetres high and must have hung next to Doré’s painting, where Soulié indicated two higher paintings. Their length (172 cm) roughly corresponds to the length of the paintings hanging above such as Protais’ Prise d’une des batteries du Mamelon vert, 156 × 201 cm (Pl. 16). Henri Durand-Brager, Panorama de Sébastopol, vue prise de la mer, 1857, oil on canvas, 98 × 173 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Henri Durand-Brager, Le Roland forçant la baie de Strélitzka, 1857, oil on canvas, 60 × 119 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles; Henri Durand-Brager, Bastion de la Quarantaine, 1857, oil canvas, 64 × 119 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles; Henri

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles

the south wall between the entrance doors, six of the smaller formats formed the plinth for Barrias’ Débarquement (Pl. 9). Having witnessed the Siege of Sevastopol as an employee of the Dépôt de la Guerre and newspaper correspondent, Durand-Brager incorporated visual sources such as his own photographs of the sites and his sketches.156 The compositions and high viewpoints of the final paintings are indeed similar to those of the prints he published in L’Illustration during the war (Fig. 27). Hornstein has established that the panorama of

Fig. 28: Henri Durand-Brager, Kamiesch: Panorama de la ville et du port, 1855–1856, albumen print, 22.8 × 56.4 cm, Musée de l‘Armée, Paris.

Kamiesch (Pl. 22) closely resembles one of the photographs Durand-Brager took of the harbour (Fig. 28).157 This modern source was then historicised by the romanticised colours of the final painting. Gautier commented after his visit to Durand-Brager’s studio that the larger panorama views could be mistaken for merely a ‘picturesque view’.158 Some of Durand-Brager’s contemporaries suggested he turn his series into a panorama.159 However, his views differed crucially from the conventional panorama estab-

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Durand-Brager, Bastion, 1857, oil on canvas, 72 × 129 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Durand-Brager worked for La Patrie, L’Illustration and Le monde illustré as well as the Dépôt de la Guerre. See Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (Bayonne-Benech), ed. Günther Meissner, vol. 8 (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 1994), 154–155; and Bardon, 1980, 54, 86. For more details on Durand-Brager’s career, see Chapter II, 87. Hornstein, 2010, 277. ‘If you had not been warned, you would think to have in front of your eyes a simple picturesque view.’ (Si vous n’étiez prévenu, vous croiriez avoir devant les yeux une simple vue pittoresque.) Théophile Gautier, ‘Le Siège de Sébastopol (tableaux de M. Durand-Brager)’, L’Artiste 1, no. 1 (26 April 1857), 61; cited and discussed in Hornstein, 2010, 280. Gautier suggested that Durand-Brager’s paintings could be studies for a panorama on the Champs-Élysées. See Gautier, 26 April 1857, 63.

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lished by Charles Langlois. Langlois’ Panorama de Sébastopol, which he had also prepared on-site with photographs and preparatory sketches, depicts the Crimean terrain from the viewpoint of the Malakoff Tower in a 360-degree view (Pl. 23).160 Durand-Brager’s paintings resemble an inverted panorama, showing the same sites from different viewpoints. In Langlois’ paintings, figures prominently depicted in the foreground are involved in fierce fighting. In contrast, the distancing view of Durand-Brager’s paintings is not supposed to engage the viewer as a perfect illusion, but has to be seen in the context of functioning as a visual support for the human drama unfolding in the large paintings of the Salle de Crimée. At the Salon of 1857, Durand-Brager’s paintings, though they had been discussed in two long articles in L’Artiste and Revue des beaux-arts even before the Salon opened, were greeted with relative silence by the critics.161 This seems surprising, considering that the twenty-one paintings must have taken up a considerable amount of wall space and, in his Salon review, Delécluze indicates that the series ‘particularly attracted the attention of the public’.162 Yet Jules Verne was the only critic to comment at length on the series. Perhaps aware of the previous publications in magazines and of Durand-Brager’s status as an eyewitness, Jules Verne did not doubt the historical accuracy of the series, attesting: ‘This is the most complete, the most vraie, and consequently the most interesting collection to have been brought back from the Crimean War.’163 The monotony of the siege found expression in Durand-Brager’s visually similar paintings. The repetitive aspect of the series is mocked in a print by Nadar showing a horizontal strip with scattered cannonballs (Fig. 29). That the image is labelled with ten numbers from the Salon catalogue and then continues with ‘& & &’ plays on the fact that the paintings’ compositions seem interchangeable when seen from far away. The panoramic views are further ridiculed in a depiction of a landscape with a giant deer in the foreground, eliminating any trace of war.164 Finally, Nadar’s depiction of the French harbour in the Crimea, where lines indicate the presence of soldiers and 160

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Langlois was in the Crimea after the allied victory, from 13 November 1855 until 12 May 1856. His panorama of Sevastopol was installed in a new rotonda on the Champs-Elysée in August 1860; see Jean-Charles Langlois (1789–1870): Le spectacle de l’histoire, eds. Caroline Joubert and François Robichon, exh. cat., Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen (Paris: Somogy, 2005), 26, 43. On the two articles see Hornstein, 2010, 279ff. Judging from the few photographs and prints of the central Salon, it seems that Durand-Brager’s paintings did not hang together with the other major paintings commemorating the Crimean War but instead hung in the adjacent rooms. ‘a particulièrement attiré l’attention du public’, Étienne-Jean Delécluze, ‘Exposition de 1857’, Journal des débats (20 June 1857), 1; cited and discussed in Hornstein, 2010, 288. ‘C’est la collection la plus complète, la plus vraie et, par conséquent, la plus intéressante qui nous ait été rapportée de la guerre de Crimée.’ Jules Verne, ‘Salon de 1857: Cinquième article’, Revue des beaux-arts 8, no. 17 (1857), 328. Nadar, Nadar jury au Salon de 1857 (Paris, 1857), 72.

The narrative of the Crimean War in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles

Fig. 29, 30:  Nadar, Nadar jury au Salon de 1857 (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1857), 16.

puffs of smoke show military action, references the suppression of the human side of the siege (Fig. 30). In Durand-Brager’s series the human side is restricted to showing the relationship to the Crimean terrain, rather than focusing on the soldiers themselves. Gautier saw in this aspect the series’ capacity to capture modern warfare. He noted that of the two options for representing war – painting several episodes of the attack and the defence, versus showing the strategic element of the war – Durand-Brager had chosen the latter, which was more accurate concerning the latest military developments and depicted the vérité absolue: ‘It (this option) rendered the ensemble of the works, the immensity of the lines, the configuration of the terrain and captured the impersonal, general and multiple aspect that is the character of modern warfare.’165 He concluded his article by noting that Durand-Brager’s series was modern because it recognised that ‘individuality disappears more and more. There is no longer a hero or a paladin, in the strict sense of the word, whose deeds one could represent in an isolated manner.’166 As

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‘Elle rendait l’ensemble des travaux, l’immensité des lignes, la configuration des terrains et gardait l’aspect impersonnel, général et multiple qui est le caractère de la guerre moderne.’ Gautier, 26 April 1857, 61. ‘L’individualité s’efface de plus en plus. Il n’y a plus de héros ni de paladin, dans le sens étroit du mot, dont on puisse représenter isolément les hauts faits.’ Gautier, 26 April 1857, 61.

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Hornstein has established, the series, inf luenced by Durand-Brager’s use of different media such as print and photography, did indeed manage to capture the decentralised aspect of modern warfare, lacking any heroic centre.167 The series certainly succeeded in illustrating the geographical and temporal aspects of the Siege of Sevastopol which, over eleven and a half months, and stretching over 120 kilometres of dug trenches, saw the exchange of 150 million gunshots and five million bombs and shells between the two sides.168 In the context of the Salle de Crimée, however, it served as supporting evidence for the terrain on which the struggles of the main paintings were played out. The soldiers, as I will suggest in the following two sections, were celebrated in Adolphe Yvon’s three paintings of the taking of the Malakoff, which constituted the centrepiece of the Salle de Crimée, framed by Durand-Brager’s series. The tension created by the need to show modern military conf licts that spread out temporally and geographically, with long-range weapons and mass mobilisation, is resolved in the Salle de Crimée. Portraits, paintings of bloody struggles, marching troops, and distancing overviews of battles hung side by side with representations of doctors and nurses taking care of French soldiers. Together, the paintings conjured up certain popular notions of the Crimean War. As mentioned previously, while the battles and siege were still ongoing at the gates of Sevastopol and the public in France was impatiently waiting for a victory, the press and government officials often compared the siege to that of Troy in Homer’s Iliad.169 To capture the extended Crimean conf lict, the hang in Versailles resorted once more to the notion of the French troops being involved in a protracted and epic effort. Appropriately for the Second Empire, which constantly sought to entertain and dazzle the public, a visitor in 1860, upon leaving the room, may have felt that he had been immersed in the modern spectacle of war. This propaganda display might seem antiquated to us today, but in 1860 the room’s eclecticism – intentional or otherwise – managed to capture the new complexity of modern warfare, of which the Crimean War is commonly seen as a watershed.170

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Hornstein, 2010, 287–288. Figes, 2010, xx. Canrobert wrote early on during the war: ‘Upon this realisation, it became understood that the siege of Sevastopol could be a long siege; no one came to terms with it in a more absolute or energetic manner than the marshal Vaillant, and when the word Trojan War was uttered, it was perhaps firstly by him!’ (Quand on le sut, on commença de comprendre que le siège de Sébastopol pouvait être un long siège, personne n’en prit plus énergiquement ni plus complètement son parti que le maréchal Vaillant, et quand le mot de Guerre de Troie fut prononcé, ce fut d’abord par lui peut-être!) Camille Rousset, Histoire de la guerre de Crimée (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie., 1878), 423; the comparison was frequently made by art critics too. See for example About, 1858, 330 and 337. Figes, 2010, xix–xxii.

The Salle de Crimée’s centrepiece: Yvon’s three Malakoff paintings

The Salle de Crimée’s centrepiece: Yvon’s three Malakoff paintings Of all Crimean War subjects, the artistic representation of the taking of the Malakoff on 8 September 1855, which led to the fall of the city of Sevastopol, took on the most urgent political significance. Adolphe Yvon was chosen for this prestigious commission, which was destined to form the centrepiece of the Salle de Crimée. In fact, on Mercey’s suggestion, Fould agreed to increase the originally stipulated payment for Yvon’s painting of 20,000 francs to 25,000 – due to, as Mercey explained, ‘the importance of the work’ – making it the most expensive painting of the Salle Crimée.171 It was first presented to the public at the Salon of 1857. Showing the victory over the Russians on a six by nine metre format, Prise de la tour de Malakoff, le 8 septembre 1855 was that year’s most important commission and was hung in the first room that the visitors entered at the exhibition (Pl. 24; Fig. 33). After the painting’s overwhelming public success at the exhibition, the government commissioned Yvon to paint two more paintings commemorating the same victory but showing it from different angles. These latter two paintings were shown at the next Salon of 1859, and would then join the first painting in Versailles to form a triptych in the Salle de Crimée (Pl. 25, Pl. 26). In addition to their success with the general public, the paintings also attracted the bulk of critical attention. Most critics were shocked by the fundamentally non-hierarchical nature of Prise. Under political pressure, Yvon had renovated conventional pictorial strategies, rendering war more real than ever before. With a focus on the first painting, I will explore how a heightened suggestion of reality in Yvon’s paintings established, as critics called it, a ‘new mode’ of military painting that served to support an official account of the war. The three paintings depict the taking, in September 1855, of one of the key Russian defence structures protecting the south side of the city of Sevastopol, the Tower of the Malakoff. This event, which led to the fall of Sevastopol on the same day, was not actually the endpoint of the war, but it was deliberately presented as such to the public by Napoleon III.172 Only halfway through the siege, in January 1855, had the

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‘l’importance du travail’, letter of the Ministère d’État to Adolphe Yvon, 23 July 1857, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 52. Neither the Russians nor the British understood the fall of the naval base as a victory over the Russians and wanted to continue the conflict. The British had commercial interests in further reducing the power of the Russian Empire and the Russians knew that their strongest enemy, the French, were keen on ending the war and were thus hoping that a continuation of the conflict would force the allies into offering better peace terms to Russia. The outcome of the war remained uncertain for another seven months after the victory at the Malakoff, and the allied troops had to remain on the peninsula for another Crimean winter until the signing of the peace treaty on 30 March 1856. On the Russians’ viewpoint of the Crimean War, see Gouttman, 2006, 362; on the Russians’ ‘bluff ’ see Figes, 2010, 397.

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newly arrived General Niel realised that taking Sevastopol would require capturing the strategically important Malakoff.173 Throughout the year, the allies’ repeated and failed efforts to take the Malakoff increased the final French death toll of 100,000 men and put Napoleon  III’s government under heightened public pressure to end the war.174 June 18 was a particularly infamous date, as the French troops lost more than 6,000 men on one day due to miscommunications among the high command. When the French, supported by the British on their f lanks, finally captured the Malakoff in September after nine months, Napoleon III was keen to present the fall of Sevastopol as the endpoint of the war to a war-weary French public. Throughout the war, the emperor had already steered public consciousness towards understanding the capture of Sevastopol as a symbolic victory over the Russians.175 As soon as the Peace Treaty was signed, Napoleon III’s domestic politics focused on the retrospective celebration of the capture of the Malakoff. Baron de Bazancourt’s official war account, published in 1857, celebrated Malakoff as ‘the golden key that has to bring victory’ and assessed that the ‘taking of Sevastopol’ – although the French never actually captured the city but carefully entered only after the Russians had evacuated it – ‘will remain a unique event in the history of the great European wars’.176 Similarly, Yvon’s painting was supposed to present the capture of the Malakoff as the decisive moment of the war and Sevastopol’s fall as an exclusively French victory. In commissioning Yvon with the Malakoff paintings, Napoleon  III thus had three major intentions: to reconcile a public horrified by the loss of life in a war which had broken out after thirty-nine years of relative peace in Europe; to legitimise his young regime by linking the war to the military glories of his uncle Napoleon I; and to present the taking of the Malakoff Tower as a French victory. This political urgency forms the context for the production of Yvon’s paintings, a commission that would remain unsurpassed during the Second Empire in terms of financial and organisational efforts.

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Canonge, 1882, vol. 1, 49. See Figes, 2010, xix. Figes, 2010, 397. ‘Malakoff! […] c’est la clef d’or qui doit donner la victoire!’ Baron de Bazancourt, L’expédition de Crimée jusqu’à la prise de Sébastopol: Chronique de la guerre d’Orient, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie d’Amyot, 1857), 440. ‘La prise de cette ville […], restera comme un fait unique dans l’histoire des grandes guerres européennes.’ Bazancourt, 1857, vol. 2, 461.

The genesis of the Malakoff paintings: Yvon’s journey to the Crimea

The genesis of the Malakoff paintings: Yvon’s journey to the Crimea As soon as the peace treaty was signed in March 1856, the Ministère d’État sent Yvon to the Crimea to draw sketches of the theatre of war and to portray and interview soldiers.177 The final paintings were not, however, particularly a result of the observation of the actual theatre of war, which had been ‘tidied up’ by the British by the time Yvon arrived in the Crimea; neither were they so much inspired by the unprecedented visual press coverage of the Crimean War. Yvon’s paintings were rather a result of his collaboration with the panorama painter Charles Langlois in the Crimea and his adoption of the art of the past. Initially, Yvon received the commission because Napoleon III wanted to atone for an embarrassing attempt by his cousin Prince Napoleon to punish Yvon’s relative, the eminent General Louis-Jules Trochu, who had criticised the prince’s premature return from the Crimean War.178 In his new role as Commissariat général of the Universal Exhibition of 1855, Prince Napoleon erased Yvon’s name from the list of nominees for the Légion d’Honneur for his painting Retraite de Russie.179 In a private meeting with the emperor at the Tuileries, organised to make up for this injustice, Yvon seized the moment and suggested to the emperor that he should paint the Malakoff in a ‘grand painting dedicated to the glory of our armies’.180 After the Ministre d’État, Achille Fould, had agreed to commission the painting for Versailles, Frédéric de Mercey subsequently took responsibility for the commission and sent the artist to the Crimea to interview the war’s protagonists and see the theatre of war for himself.181 On 9 April 1856, nine days after the peace treaty had been signed and the allies had started withdrawing from the Crimea, Yvon arrived at the

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See correspondence of Ministère d’État, Archives nationales F21/112. Louis-Jules Trochu had been offered the position of chef d’état-major de l’armée for the Crimean army which, as an opponent of the Second Empire, he had turned down and fought as ‘général de brigade’ instead. See Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 15, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1876), s. v. ‘Trochu’; Trochu was the brother-in-law of an uncle of Yvon’s. See A. Augustin-Thierry, ‘Adolphe Yvon: Souvenirs d’un peintre militaire’, Revue des deux mondes 103 (15 October 1933), 850–852; and Henry Jouin, ‘Adolphe Yvon’, L’Artiste 6 (September 1893), 176. Jouin, September 1893, 176. ‘grand tableau à la gloire de nos armes’; one of Yvon’s letters to his son cited in Jouin, September 1893, 176. Mercey wrote to General Pélissier: ‘I have assigned M. Yvon, painter, to carry out the research necessary for the execution of a painting of the Taking of the Tower of Malakoff.’ ( J’ai chargé M. Yvon, peintre, de faire les études nécessaires à l’exécution d’un tableau de la Prise de la Tour de Malakoff.) See letter of 6 February 1856, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 52.

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harbour of Kamiesch Bay, near Sevastopol.182 The artist was received by none other than the commander-in-chief of the French troops, Marshal Pélissier, who had been asked to arrange everything necessary for him to gain a full impression of the theatre of war.183 Yvon spent the following weeks with the main protagonists of his three Malakoff paintings, who showed him around. General Vinoy in particular did everything possible to give him an impression of the capture of the Malakoff, even ordering Russian prisoners to pose for the artist.184 General Vinoy’s dedication may have been calculated, as the artist would later thank him by placing him as the most prominent figure in La gorge de Malakoff although the general had not been among the military figures that had particularly stood out during the capture of the Malakoff.185 Yvon’s close collaboration with the high command is important to note as he was inf luenced by the high command’s perceptions of the events in his pictorial translation. The other person who welcomed Yvon to the Crimea and who would have an inf luence on the distinctive composition of Prise de Malakoff was the famous panorama painter Jean-Charles Langlois.186 The Ministère d’État had commissioned him to paint 182

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Yvon travelled together with his artist friend Bida and his pupil Chardon, Dictionnaire du Second Empire, 1995, 1339; Chardon died of typhus shortly after arriving, letter by Yvon cited in Jouin, September 1893, 180. Yvon asked Mercey before his departure: ‘I would hence like to ask you, Monsieur, on behalf of the Monsieur le Ministère d’État, to be so good to deliver a mission that will give me accreditation with the military authorities in the Crimea so that all the facilities and evidences are given to me at the theatre of events.’ ( Je viens donc vous prier, Monsieur, de la part de Monsieur le Ministre d’État, d’être assez bon pour me délivrer une mission qui m’accrédite auprès des autorités militaires de Crimée afin que toutes facilités et tous renseignements me soient donnés sur le théâtre des évènements.) Letter of 20 January 1856, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 52. Mercey consequently wrote to Pélissier: ‘I ask you to recommend him to the higher officers as well as the ones under your orders. I will be very much obliged for everything that you will do in order to facilitate the accomplishment of his mission.’ ( Je vous prie de vouloir bien le recommander aux officiers supérieurs et sous vos ordres. Je vous serai obligé de tout ce que vous ferez pour lui faciliter l’accomplissement de sa mission.) Letter of 6 February 1856, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 52. The artist seems to have had an appointment with Pélissier immediately after his arrival in the Crimea. See Yvon in a letter to his son, cited in Augustin-Thierry, 15 October 1933, 857. Letter by Yvon, cited in Jouin, September 1893, 181; Langlois also mentioned that Yvon went to the main sites with Vinoy. See Langlois to his wife, letter sent from Grand Quartier général, 15 April 1857, cited in Jean-Charles Langlois: La photographie, la peinture, la guerre. Correspondance inédite de Crimée (1855–1856), eds. François Robichon and André Rouillé (Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 1992), 217. As the Salon catalogue indicated, Vinoy was in charge of the 20e brigade de la division d’assaut, which occupied one part of the Malakoff. However, he was not among the three main protagonists of the capture who were Mac-Mahon for the Malakoff, Dulac for Le Petit Redan and La Motterouge for La Grande Courtine. See Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 10, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1873), s. v. ‘Malakoff.’ On Langlois’ and Yvon’s collaboration in the Crimea see Hornstein, 2010, 297–301.

The genesis of the Malakoff paintings: Yvon’s journey to the Crimea

the battle of the Malakoff on several canvases for a panorama booth to be installed on the Champs-Elysées.187 Entrusted with this important mission, Langlois carried out research in the Crimea for seven months, taking photographs and visiting all the battle sites to execute sketches.188 His Panorama de la prise de Sébastopol, which opened in August 1860, would be closely based on his photographs, covering a 360-degree view from the Malakoff over the surrounding terrain (Pl. 23).189 According to Langlois, Yvon’s trip to the Crimea was a failure. Even before Yvon had arrived, Langlois had tersely dismissed his project: ‘If he only has this tower in order to produce a masterpiece, he might just as well stay at home, as the little that remains is probably distorted.’190 A military officer himself, Langlois thought that, without any military expertise, one could not make sense of the battle site, which had been ‘cleaned up’. Langlois wrote in a patronising tone: ‘Poor M. Yvon, what disappointment when he will see Malakoff and not find even a cannon there.’191 While Yvon was certainly disappointed when he first saw the Malakoff and admitted he had difficulty imagining the heroic assault when confronted with this ‘clump of mud’,192 he would nevertheless later insist on his reliability as an eyewitness: ‘Since the day of the assault, nothing has been either changed or tidied up. I have therefore seen the terrain in the same state in which it was after the terrible battle.’193

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‘Société des panoramas. Exposé préliminaire aux statuts définitifs. Projet du 21 décembre 1858.’ Archives nationales F21/491 dossier 2; and Bardon, 1980, 252–253. Hornstein, 2010, 297–301. Jean-Charles Langlois (1789–1870): Le spectacle de l’histoire, 2005, 147–162. ‘S’il n’a que cette tour pour faire un chef-d’œuvre, il ferait aussi bien de rester chez lui, car le peu qui reste est probablement défiguré.’ Adolphe Yvon to his wife, letter sent from Grand Quartier général, 4 March 1856, cited in Jean-Charles Langlois: La photographie, la peinture, la guerre. Correspondance inédite de Crimée (1855–1856), 1992, 175. ‘Pauvre M. Yvon, quel désenchantement quand il verra Malakoff et qu’il n’y trouvera même plus un canon.’ Langlois to his wife, letter of 25 March 1856, cited in Jean-Charles Langlois: La photographie, la peinture, la guerre. Correspondance inédite de Crimée (1855–1856), 1992, 195. ‘What I had imagined of Malakoff was grandiose and formidable. I was thus mildly disappointed upon finding a structure made up of wicker baskets, having, at best, a height of fifteen metres. The exterior slopes, made up of loose earth, descended to the bottom of a ditch, which was three quarters filled. […] A layman cannot imagine how to master what seems to be a clump of mud; it needs so much effort, so much time and so much blood.’ ( Je m’étais fait de Malakoff une image grandiose et formidable. Aussi ne fus-je pas médiocrement désappointé en trouvant un ouvrage gabionné, ayant, tout au plus, quinze mètres de relief. Les talus extérieurs, composés de terres mouvantes, descendaient jusqu’au fond d’un fossé aux trois quarts comblé. […] Un profane ne peut imaginer que, pour se rendre maître de ce qui semble une motte de terre, il faille tant d’efforts, tant de temps et tant de sang.) Yvon to his son, letter cited in Jouin, September 1893, 179. ‘Depuis le jour de l’assaut, rien n’avait été ni changé, ni déblayé. Je voyais donc le terrain dans l’état même où il était à la suite de l’effroyable lutte.’ Yvon to his son, letter cited in Jouin, September 1893, 179–180.

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Fig. 31:  Adolphe Yvon, Un champ de bataille, 1856, pen on paper, 15 × 23 cm, Inv. RF 42606.33, Département des Arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Yvon’s Crimean sketchbook demonstrates that the genesis of Prise was rooted in the academic tradition of developing a painting through a gradual additive process.194 Yvon did not carry out the same in-depth research of the Crimean terrain as did Langlois. Instead, he used the mode of drawing to develop his ideas and compositions, executing portraits in charcoal and jotting down compositional sketches. Perhaps Langlois was right and Yvon did indeed not have to go to the Crimea to prepare his painting. As several handwritten pages in his sketchbook testify, Yvon’s research into the course of events during the assault was restricted to a generic summary of the main occurrences focusing on the names involved. The only information Yvon obtained from the central figure of his final painting, General Mac-Mahon, was the following request: ‘I ask you […] not to represent me gesticulating, because I was perfectly calm. And furthermore, I was wearing a képi; will you not plant a hat on my head?’195 While Langlois was surprised to find that Yvon’s sketch of the ensemble had nothing to do with the actual formation of the assault, Yvon was satisfied with the result and mentioned in a letter that he had returned home with a complete sketch that would be the final composition.196 The drawing that I assume Yvon made in the Crimea does in fact 194

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Sketchbook kept at the Départment des Arts Graphiques du Louvre, Inv. RF 42606. My working assumption that Yvon had used this sketchbook in the Crimea is based on the sequence of drawings starting with sketches of the Crimean terrain, portraits and finally sketches of the ship on which Yvon sailed back to France. ‘Je vous demanderai […] de ne pas me représenter gesticulant, car j’étais parfaitement calme. Et puis j’étais en képi, n’allez pas me planter un chapeau sur la tête.’ Augustin-Thierry, 15 October 1933, 858. ‘He (Yvon) has finished a study which has nothing to do at all with what existed at the time of the attack he wants to represent.’ (Il [Yvon] a terminé une étude qui n’a de rapport d’aucune sorte avec ce qui existait lors de l’attaque qu’il veut représenter.) Langlois, letter to his

The genesis of the Malakoff paintings: Yvon’s journey to the Crimea

Fig. 32:  James Robertson, Sébastopol – partie de bastion du grand Redan, c. 1855, salt print, 22.5 × 57 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

closely resemble the final painting (Fig. 31). The sketch demonstrates that Yvon built up his painting around a few focal points, namely the high command in the background and the zouave Lihaut and General Mac-Mahon in the centre. When Yvon left the Crimea at the end of April 1856, the evacuation of the French troops had already begun. Yvon reported that, back in Paris, ‘the whole army, grand and small, passed through my studio during the execution of the painting of Malakoff ’ to inf luence the prominence of the figures and to be portrayed.197 Yvon now also devised the poses and body parts of the previously sketched portraits, gradually developing the ‘episodes’ that surrounded the predetermined focal points. For the Crimean terrain he drew directly on photographs by James Robertson (for example, Fig. 32).198 The use of photography for the terrain was not new, having already been conventionalised by Vernet’s employment of daguerreotypes for his Algerian campaign paintings. As a visual analysis of the finished painting, Prise de la tour de Malakoff, and a close reading of its critical reception at the Salon of 1857 will suggest, Yvon embedded these elements into a composition that he had developed from art-historical precedents, a combination that would enhance the impression of immediacy and reality of the battle.

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wife, 26 April 1856, cited in Jean-Charles Langlois: La photographie, la peinture, la guerre. Correspondance inédite de Crimée (1855–1856), 1992, 225. ‘toute l’armée, grands et petits, passa par mon atelier pendant l’exécution du tableau de Malakoff ’, cited in Jouin, September 1893, 184. Langlois to his wife, letter of 27 April 1856, cited in Jean-Charles Langlois: La photographie, la peinture, la guerre. Correspondance inédite de Crimée (1855–1856), 1992, 228.

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Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857 Prise de la tour de Malakoff (Pl. 24) was perceived as remarkably innovative when first exhibited at the Salon of 1857. Showing the acclaimed final victory over the Russians, the subject rendered Yvon’s painting the most important among the ensemble of military paintings, which presented the official storyline of the war from the opening of hostilities to the signing of the peace treaty. The canvas stood out by its sheer size (six by nine metres), dwarfing all paintings around it, and – as a contemporary photograph by Richebourg of the installation illustrates – occupied the largest part of the Salon d’Honneur, the first room visitors to the exhibition would enter (Fig. 33). The painting’s subject is the moment when the French have penetrated the Malakoff crater. There are only a few Russian soldiers depicted, recognisable by their brown uniforms. The colourful and exotic-looking uniforms of most of the soldiers in the painting identify them as zouaves. The world-famous uniform is recognisable in the depiction of the central figure holding the f lag of France: the headdress consisting of a red fez with a long tassel, the short jacket and the baggy scarlet trousers tucked into leather gaiters.199 Three of these zouaves dominate the composition. Standing on the remains of the stone tower atop Malakoff Hill to the right, General Mac-Mahon, who commanded the first division of the zouaves, plants his sabre into the conquered ground. On the central hilltop, the young Corporal Lihaut triumphantly holds the French f lag. In the central foreground, the wounded Colonel Collineau swings his sabre, leading the zouaves into the Russian defence work towards the viewer.200 There is an explosion at the right, and opaque clouds of white smoke indicate further fighting in the background. The colours and grouping of soldiers emphasise the impression that the painting is divided into different zones of attention and separate the image into several horizontal strips. Since it was necessary to avoid representing the fierce Russian resistance, the failures of communication within the French army and other uncertainties, Yvon could not depict the battle simply by drawing on conventional pictorial strategies; Gautier remarked that painting the war must almost have been harder than fighting it.201 In 1857, conventional pictorial strategies were those that had been developed by the artists 199 200

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John Mollo, Military Fashion: A Comparative History of the Uniforms of the Great Armies from the Seventeenth Century to the First World War (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1979), 166. Yvon also portrayed many of the other soldiers, who came to sit for him in his atelier. See Jouin, September 1893, 184; Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des ChampsÉlysées, le 15 juin 1857, 1857, cat. 2708. Also see painting file on Yvon, Prise de la tour de Malakoff, MV1969, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. ‘The Tower of Malakoff was perhaps more difficult to capture in a painting than in reality; but M. Yvon has put up a good fight like a real Zouave.’ (La tour Malakoff était plus difficile peut-être à emporter en peinture qu’en réalité; mais M. Yvon s’est battu comme un vrai zouave.) Gautier, 7 November 1857, 145.

Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857

Fig. 33:  Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, Salon de 1857, vue d’une salle, 1857, photograph on albumen paper, Musée d‘Orsay, Paris.

commissioned to paint the campaigns under the July Monarchy for the Musée historique de Versailles, such as Vernet. Vernet’s painting La Smala (1845; Pl. 1) continued to be a reference point for critics discussing military paintings in 1857, especially since it had been exhibited again at the Universal Exhibition two years earlier. As discussed in the first chapter, Vernet had overturned the academic tradition of composing a battle painting around one focal point by including an abundance of anecdotes and adopting a seemingly documentary mode of battle painting. While, in Vernet’s La Smala, the frieze-like arrangement of several anecdotes rendered in a precise, descriptive mode suggests an objective overview, Yvon’s aim was, as he said, to plunge the spectator into combat: ‘Fortunately, Napoleon III did not command the Crimean army in person. I therefore had full freedom. I used it to abandon the conventional tradition and to place the spectator right in the middle of the combat.’202 In formal terms, the composition of Prise corresponds largely to conventional principles of how a military painting should be composed, as outlined by About in 1857:

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‘Par fortune, Napoléon III ne commandait pas, en personne, l’armée de Crimée. Ma liberté restait donc entière. J’en usai pour abandonner la tradition conventionnelle et mettre le spectateur au beau milieu de la lutte.’ Jouin, September 1893, 187.

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Show us in the foreground what the public hopes to find in a battle, that means people fighting […]. Relegate tactics to the middle ground […]. Do not sacrifice the episode, but leave it in a corner […]. Do not eliminate the figure of the commander-in-chief either, but reveal him in the battle as the soul reveals itself in a body.203 Yvon placed the actual battle in the foreground, showing a semi-circular sea of guns and cannons still being fired, French soldiers battling Russians, and scattered corpses. Strategy and tactics are relegated to the background, where one can just make out another French f lag on the hilltop of Mamelon Vert from where the commander of the French forces, General Pélissier, was directing the allied troops.204 Critics called these centres of action ‘episodes’, whereas they had referred to Vernet’s as ‘anecdotes.’ The Larousse dictionary defines anecdotes as ‘stories made to please’, as ‘secret’ or ‘little known […] particularities’ that ‘animate curiosity’ and are ‘amusing’; an ‘episode’, on the other hand, is described as a ‘detached incident, history or other action, that an author uses to interrupt the principal action to imbue the story with more vérité’; episodes are part of a ‘series of events which form an ensemble’.205 In line with this definition, critics had dismissed Vernet’s ‘anecdotes’ as amusing and condemned some of them as unimportant for the message of the painting, while they acknowledged that Yvon’s ‘episodes’ contributed to the conferring of historical truth.206 Yvon restricted the number of episodes, as Gautier noted in his Salon review, to those that were most ‘characteristic’ of the Crimean War.207 Each episode was identified in the accompanying text of the Salon livret as a contributory factor in the assault. Critics who held these episodes as part of an ensemble also considered them reminiscent of the compositions of Gros, who grouped simultaneous actions in Bataille d’Eylau of 1808, among other works.208 Annie Bardon has attributed the compositions of each of these 203

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‘Montrez-nous sur le premier plan ce que le public espère trouver dans une bataille, c’està-dire des gens qui se battent […]. Reléguez la tactique au second plan […]. Ne sacrifiez pas l’épisode […], mais laissez-le dans un coin […]. N’effacez pas non plus la figure du général en chef, mais montrez-le dans la bataille comme l’âme se montre dans le corps.’ About, 1858, 338. Royle, 2000, 401. ‘Anecdotes […] récits faits à plaisir […] particularités secrètes d’histoire, particularités qui piquaient vivement la curiosité […] particularité d’histoire peu connue […] amusante.’ Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 1, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1866), s. v. ‘anecdote’; ‘Épisode […] un incident, histoire ou autre action détachée, qu’un auteur fait intervenir dans son action principale pour donner plus de vérité au récit.’, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 7, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1870), s. v. ‘épisode.’ ‘peinture épisodique’, About, 1858, 335. Gautier, 7 November 1857, 145. Calonne, 1 July 1857, 598.

Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857

centres of action to First Empire paintings, arguing that Yvon tried to transfer the meaning of these paintings to his work.209 However, the painting’s genesis and critical reception suggest that Yvon had other concerns. The Salon livret named fifteen of the sixty figures that Yvon portrayed in the Crimea and in his Paris studio, and underneath the painting a key seems to have been exhibited, which one can discern in Richebourg’s photograph of the Salon installation.210 This key is probably the same as the one kept today in the painting’s file in Versailles.211 Yvon understood the portraits as ‘playing […] the essential role’ in his painting.212 The large number of portraits of Frenchmen helped to suggest that the entire mass of French soldiers depicted in the painting had contributed to the course of the event.213 (Although the Russians had also posed for Yvon in the Crimea, their names remained unknown to the Salon visitor.) That Yvon included portraits of common soldiers, who had remained anonymous in previous battle paintings, further emphasised the perceived historical truth. The individual actions of the portrayed figures are finally woven into an overall narrative by the livret, which thereby becomes an integral part of the artwork. In the livret, introductory words such as ‘at the moment when this scene happened’ indicate that the painting is made up of simultaneous actions rather than a chronological narrative.214 Stefan Germer, in his 1997 essay Taken on the Spot: Zur Insze­­nierung des Zeitgenössischen in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts, on the inf luence of new viewing habits on the production and reception of history painting, has convincingly argued that this simultaneity and the canvas’ large scale changed the act of viewing. The simultaneity of actions, Germer argues, denies any clear legibility; the painting’s subject is instead revealed through effects similar to the fragmented experience a soldier participating in the battle would have had: effect replaces narrative. He further notes that this viewing experience was geared both towards mass reception, as theorised by

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Bardon, 1980, 109–112. Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 15 juin 1857, 1857, 343–344. Key for Adolphe Yvon, Prise de la tour de Malakoff, 1857, painting file MV1969, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. ‘I not only had to record the layout of the terrain, to note the movements of the troops and the prominent episodes, but also had to portray the personages that have to play, in my painting, the essential roles.’ ( J’avais, non seulement à relever la configuration du terrain, à noter les mouvements de troupes et les épisodes saillants, mais encore à prendre les portraits des personnages qui devaient jouer, dans mon tableau, les rôles essentiels.) AugustinThierry, 15 October 1933, 862. A.-J. Du Pays, ‘Salon de 1857’, L’Illustration 30, no. 749 (4 July 1857), 6. ‘au moment où se passe cette scène’, Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 15 juin 1857, 1857, 343.

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Walter Benjamin, and as a distraction from its propagandistic nature.215 However, the contemporary criticism would appear to contradict Germer’s analysis of the effects of this compositional structure. Despite the simultaneity of actions resulting from the lack of a clearly defined content focus, Yvon’s contemporaries seem to have found the canvas’ narrative entirely legible. The critic Alphonse de Calonne called the composition ‘open’ and argued that the viewer could therefore ‘read it like a book’, confirming the notion of the visual perception of the whole painting taking place in stages.216 About pointed out that the individual episodes could be ‘read clearly’.217 The replacement of the conferring of universal truth by a narrative had already been explored by Delaroche and Vernet and was now developed further by Delaroche’s pupil Yvon. The use of episodes also derived from panoramic strategies pioneered by Vernet and Langlois. Two decades later, Houssaye confirmed that the panoramic elements of Yvon’s painting were directly associated with Vernet’s La Smala: ‘Conceived somewhat in the manner of La prise de la Smala, this canvas […] has the fault of being reminiscent of some vast panorama.’218 But Yvon went further in the adoption of panoramic elements than Vernet by employing a viewpoint formerly only used by panorama painters such as Langlois. The latter was surprised that Yvon chose to execute his composition sketch from one of the spots he had chosen as a viewpoint for his own panorama.219 The viewpoints in Langlois’ and Yvon’s final paintings are indeed strikingly similar, both showing the round Malakoff crater from the inside (Pl. 23, Fig. 43). In fact, Yvon stated later that he was ‘trying to abandon the conventional tradition’ and, as mentioned earlier, wanted to construct the viewer in the centre of the combat.220 However, for Langlois, this was just one of many views of the assault, showing, among other scenes, the city of Sevastopol and the high command’s positions, which would surround the viewer in the booth, whereas Yvon chose only a fragment of this 360-degree view. 215

216 217 218

219 220

Stefan Germer, ‘Taken on the Spot: Zur Inszenierung des Zeitgenössischen in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Bilder der Macht – Macht der Bilder: Zeitgeschichte in Darstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. Stefan Germer and Michael F. Zimmermann (Munich and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997), 29. ’L’ensemble du tableau est bien ouvert; on y peut lire comme dans un livre.’ Calonne, 1 July 1857, 598. ‘se lisent clairement’, About, 1858, 341. ‘Conçue un peu à la façon de la prise de la Smala, cette toile […] a le défaut de rappeler quelque vaste panorama,’ Henry Houssaye, ‘La peinture de batailles: Le nouveau tableau de M. Meissonier. – L’Exposition des œuvres de Pils’, Revue des deux mondes 13 (15 February 1876), 864–889; criticism of Yvon’s composition was not nearly as fierce as that of Vernet’s La Smala and most commentators agreed that Yvon’s painting had more unity than Vernet’s paintings. See for example Montaiglon, September 1857, 537. Langlois to his wife, letter of 27 April 1856, cited in Jean-Charles Langlois: La photographie, la peinture, la guerre. Correspondance inédite de Crimée (1855–1856), 1992, 228. ‘J’essayai d’abandonner la tradition conventionelle’, Augustin-Thierry, 15 October 1933, 842.

Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857

Critics did feel there was something missing from Yvon’s painting. The alignment of French soldiers looking out of the picture made them wonder who the visual addressee of the painting was. Gautier was sure: ‘It is not the spectator that they are looking at.’221 As Pélissier is placed on the hilltop behind the Malakoff in the background, the French soldiers must be facing their final military goal, the city of Sevastopol.222 The viewer of Yvon’s canvas, as Verne rightly observed, is consequently placed between the French soldiers and Sevastopol;223 the view of Sevastopol is absent in Yvon’s depiction, whereas Langlois was able to show the city because he painted the full 360-degree view of the battle site for a round panorama booth. Perhaps Yvon chose this viewpoint to avoid having to depict Sevastopol, which took the allies almost two years to capture and had come to stand for the fierce Russian opposition that the historian Frédéric Canonge judged to be even superior to the French, and which had not yet been captured when the Malakoff fell.224 The critics’ reactions demonstrate that Langlois was right when he anticipated that Yvon’s painting would be a ‘panorama condensed to the proportions of a simple painting’.225 The centres of action in Yvon’s painting are arranged not only horizontally, as in Vernet’s twenty-one-metre-long La Smala, but also vertically. This arrangement as in an ‘amphitheatre’, as Houssaye would call it in 1876, results partly from the viewpoint chosen.226 Placed at the eye-level of Corporal Lihaut, the spectator can see the battle in the Malakoff crater below but can also see beyond the Malakoff where the terrain opens up into a panoramic view. The raised viewpoint could be a realistic one, as the dark foreground shadow may have been cast by an actual hilltop upon which the spectator is placed. Yvon’s composition sketch also implies that the painting is developed from this viewpoint, focusing on the elevation of Lihaut. That the Crimean terrain ultimately takes up three quarters of the canvas seems realistic, considering that, in Robertson’s photograph, which we know Yvon used as a model, the horizon line of the distant hill chain is in the upper margin although the picture was taken from a lower viewpoint within the Malakoff crater. While Langlois adopted this low viewpoint in 221 222 223

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‘Ce n’est pas le spectateur qu’elles (les figures) regardent,’ Gautier, 7 November 1857, 145. Langlois did provide the spectator with a view of Sevastopol whereas Yvon only included a view of the city in La gorge de Malakoff (Salon of 1859). ‘The spectator is placed among the Russians and faces the French attack.’ (Le spectateur est placé parmi les Russes et fait face à l’attaque française.) Jules Verne, ‘Salon de 1857: Troisième article’, Revue des beaux-arts 8, no. 15 (1857), 288. ‘If […] we leave aside all national spirit, we have to acknowledge that the defence has been much superior to the attack, at least for a long time.’ (Si […] nous laissons de côté tout esprit de nationalité, il faut reconnaître que la défense a été bien supérieure à l’attaque, pendant longtemps du moins.) Canonge, 1882, vol. 1, 106. ‘panorama condonsé dans les proportions d’un simple tableau’, Langlois to his wife, letter of 27 April 1856, cited in Jean-Charles Langlois: La photographie, la peinture, la guerre. Correspondance inédite de Crimée (1855–1856), 1992, 228. Houssaye, 15 February 1876, 873.

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his Sevastopol panorama, casting the viewer into the middle of the combat, Yvon placed the spectator at eye-level with Lihaut and the French f lag, thereby emphasising the accomplished victory. It is important to note that the raised viewpoint within the painting does not correspond to the actual viewpoint a visitor to the Salon of 1857 would have had. As Richebourg’s photograph of the installation demonstrates, the painting was hung at a height of approximately two metres. So although Yvon construed the viewer as looking down on the foreground scene, in the exhibition space at the Salon, the spectators’ heads would not even have been level with the lower frame of the painting. To appreciate the full image, the viewer has to retreat to a distance of several metres. When standing in front of the painting, we are closest to the dark shadow and the semi-circle of figures in the foreground, which draw us into the painting. In fact, this foreground scene in itself could form a separate painting. The large canvas and fragmented composition deny a clear overview, and, as Germer points out, the spectator judges the event gradually, from individual scenes, looking up.227 By moving some elements closer to the picture plane, Yvon enhanced the immediacy, an effect that some contemporaries found disconcerting. In contrast to Vernet’s La Smala, the audience was no longer separated from the action by an empty foreground. The result was a claustrophobic feeling, which Calonne simply pinpointed by stating baldly: There is […] one […] serious fault which M. Horace Vernet has never committed: the canvas of M. Yvon lacks space in the foreground; there is not enough distance between the rail and the lower edge of the frame to contain so many men and become the theatre of so fierce a battle.228 On the contrary, in the bottom right corner of Yvon’s painting a Russian soldier shot in the back of the head by a French rif leman is apparently falling head first onto the viewer. Gros had already employed this device of engaging the viewer in Eylau (Salon of 1808), where he also showed a Russian moving towards the viewer’s space in the bottom right corner of the painting. Three decades later, Vernet had taken this device further, depicting a group of horses speeding towards the spectators of his painting La Smala. Yvon moved the Russian even closer to the picture plane, thereby contributing to a further fragmentation of the composition. Contemporaries were not sure where they should stand to view the painting and felt the Russian extended into the viewer’s

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Germer, 1997, 29. ‘Il est toutefois une faute plus grave que M. Horace Vernet n’aurait jamais commise: le tableau de M. Yvon, dans ses premiers plans, manque d’espace; il n’y a pas assez distance entre le parapet et le bord inférieur du cadre, pour contenir tant d’hommes et devenier le théâtre d’un combat si acharné.’ Calonne, 1 July 1857, 598–599.

Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857

Fig. 34:  Horace Vernet, Zouaves at the Malakoff, 1856, oil on canvas, 39.7 × 33.9 cm, Royal Collection Trust.

space. About noted: ‘It is not the task of a painting to walk outside (itself ).’229 Besides, he remarked ironically, this extension into the viewer’s space could never be artistically correct, as ‘the poor devil should logically cast his shade on the frame and on the wall.’230 A further problem could have been that the soldier was Russian, threatening a French viewer’s space. This must presumably have been Vernet’s concern, as he had no trouble depicting, a couple of months later, a French zouave falling head first towards the viewer (Fig. 34). It is important to note that both Yvon’s soldier and Vernet’s zouave are the victims of violence and are therefore not attacking the viewer; they can only seem threatening by becoming figures of identification for the viewer. Although Yvon drew on familiar art-historical precedents, notably Gros, the sense of actuality applied to the depiction of a dying Russian seems to have overstepped a boundary. While, in 1855, critics lamented that Vernet’s clean renderings of the war were implausible, not a single reviewer wished to see the blood spilled so recently by his fellow countrymen. In the 1850s, photographers still refrained from recording the grim reality of death, and it was only through the media of printed drawings and paint-

229 230

‘ce n’est pas au tableau à se promener dehors’, About, 1858, 342. ‘ce pauvre diable devrait logiquement projeter son ombre sur la bordure et sur la muraille’, About, 1858, 342.

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ings that it was communicated to the public.231 The larger-than-life size of Yvon’s figures and the meticulous execution mode rendered this depiction of death more real than any photograph of the time could have done. An anonymous author in the Magasin Pittoresque even feared that Yvon’s painting would haunt the French nation like a bad dream, rather than constitute the glorious souvenir the government had intended it to be.232 However, the fact that Salon crowds were simultaneously repulsed and fascinated announces an era in which the evocation of shock is exploited, in the words of Susan Sontag, as a ‘leading stimulus of consumption’.233 Although Vernet’s mode of execution was at least as meticulous, Yvon’s precise execution was furthermore perceived as so closely imitating reality that it rendered the war even more immediate. Whereas Vernet had already confronted his audiences with this ‘realism’, Yvon now used it to visualise the ugly aspects of war. Art critics missed the ‘séverité’ that they thought should endow every soldier’s face in combat and were shocked to find that, as Calonne put it, ‘The painter was obviously inspired by a vulgar thought which he also obeyed by giving several of his characters the look of miscreants, saliva on the mouths and eyes coming out of their sockets.’234 That the perceived violence was discussed as are video games today becomes clear in a cartoon by Cham (Fig. 35). It shows two children fighting and their worried parents exclaiming that Yvon’s painting is to blame for this emotional arousal. The realism of Prise coupled with its staged nature made the capture of the Malakoff more credible as the endpoint of the war, which in reality it was not. One could transfer Du Camp’s observation of another battle painting to Yvon’s canvas: ‘The skilful execution of this big canvas renders its appearance more violent; it is horrible as the disaster itself, it is the war!’235 On an artistic level, critics rejected Yvon’s Prise for showing modern death, which they considered insufficiently picturesque to figure in a history painting. According to About, the wounds caused by contemporary weapons were not spectacular 231

232 233 234

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The photographer Roger Fenton consciously refrained from taking pictures of the dead English soldiers, cited in Royle, 2000, 342; on the shortcomings of photography during the Crimean War see André Rouillé, ‘Ein photographisches Gefecht auf der Krim’, in Bilder der Macht – Macht der Bilder: Zeitgeschichte in Darstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. Stefan Germer and Michael F. Zimmermann (Munich and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997). Anonymous, ‘Le public et les œuvres d’art: La visite d’un Salon’, Magasin Pittoresque 25 (December 1857), 395, footnote 3. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 20. ‘Le peintre s’est inspiré évidemment d’une pensée vulgaire à laquelle il a également obéi en donnant à plusieurs de ses personnages l’aspect d’énergumènes, la bave aux lèvres et les yeux sortant de leurs orbites.’ Calonne, 1 July 1857, 598. ‘La facture habile de cette grande toile rend son aspect encore plus violent; c’est horrible comme le désastre lui-même, c’est la guerre!’ Maxime Du Camp, Salon de 1857 (Paris: ­Librairie nouvelle, 1857), 50. Du Camp’s observation referred to Devilly’s painting, Un Bivouac en 1812, which was safely situated in the distant past, but one might argue that this statement also alluded to Yvon’s Malakoff, which the critic did not mention once in his 1857 review.

Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857

Fig. 35:  Cham (Amédée de Noé), Le Salon de 1857 illustré par Cham (Paris: La Librairie Nouvelle, 1857).

enough, generally reduced to ‘a tear in the uniform in which a small and invisible wound is bleeding’.236 To depict one of the mutilations caused by bombs that ripped away entire body parts and that were so vividly described by one of the most famous participants in the Crimean War, Leo Tolstoy, does not seem to have occurred to either artists or critics.237 The menacing effect of the individual elements in Prise was arguably neutralised by the overall composition made up of several vertically aligned figures. The way in which the representation of death was perceived seems to have been inherently linked to the composition. This becomes especially clear in Yvon’s later paintings, in which the focused compositions rendered the piles of cadavers and gruesome Russian faces harmless; in fact, these elements were even hailed as the most picturesque aspect of the paintings.

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‘un accroc à l’uniforme, et une petite blessure invisible qui saigne en dedans.’ About, 1858, 335. Léon Tolstoï, Sébastopol en mai et août 1855, souvenirs du comte Léon Tolstoï (Paris, n. d.). Immediately after its 1855 publication in Russian, the emperor of Russia Alexander II asked Tolstoy to translate the book into French. This publication was probably known to the French public at the time, as the Larousse dictionary suggests, praising Tolstoy for the Sevastopol Sketches, War and Peace and Anna Karenina as a ‘brilliant’ contemporary novelist. See Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1876, s. v. ‘Tolstoï.’

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Fig. 36:  Hippolyte Bellangé, Épisode de la prise de Malakoff (campagne de Crimée), 1859, oil on canvas, 46 × 55 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille.

The suggestion of reality circumvents the historical inaccuracies, which a government keen on representing the capture of Sevastopol as a French, rather than a British or Ottoman, victory must have welcomed. For example, Lihaut’s waving of the f lag was in reality nothing more than a signal for the British to start their attack on the other defence structures.238 It was an act previously laid down in the official plan of action and was neither a spontaneous outburst of victorious joy nor the endpoint of the battle, as Yvon’s painting seems to suggest. According to the battle plan, Lihaut should be turning behind him towards the hill in the background where the high command was stationed, as in the representations by Bellangé and Vernet (Fig. 36, Fig. 37). Vernet’s 238

It seems that Lihaut’s achievements were first mentioned in the Le Constitutionnel; see Bouniol, 1856, 303, footnote; on the plan of action that mentions that Lihaut’s signal was stipulated in the plan of battle but does not name him specifically, see Canonge, 1882, vol. 1, 87; Royle, 2000, 410; Alexis Troubetzkoy, The Crimean War: The Causes and Consequences of a Medieval Conflict Fought in a Modern Age (London: Robinson, 2006), 291; and Figes, 2010, 390.

Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857

Fig. 37:  Horace Vernet, La prise de la tour de Malakoff, 1858, oil on canvas, 219 × 144 cm, Musée Rolin, Autun.

painting also features a British general, whereas Yvon avoided portraying any allies and depicted Lihaut incorrectly, looking towards the enemy in the north, and the viewer. A comparison with Vernet’s painting of the capture of the Malakoff suggests the government’s explicit wish to manipulate the historical truth in regard to the placement of Lihaut in Yvon’s painting. When the Ministère d’État still considered Vernet a candidate for the commission eventually given to Yvon, Vernet depicted Lihaut as facing the viewer, as we know from a detail he published in l’Illustration (Fig. 38). When the mayor of Autun finally commissioned Vernet to finish the painting as a tribute to General Mac-Mahon, who had been born in Autun, Vernet changed the figure of Lihaut.239 In the final version, Lihaut more realistically turns his back to the viewer,

239

The painting entered the collection of the Musée Rolin in August 1858. See painting file H.V. 28, Musée Rolin, Autun.

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Fig. 38:  Horace Vernet, Le caporal Lihaut, engraved by J. Worm, in: A. Dulong, ‘Le caporal Lihaut’, L’Illustration 30, no. 751 (18 July 1857), 48.

looking southeast towards where the high command was stationed during the attack.240 Furthermore, Vernet’s painting now features the British officer Sir Michael Biddulph who is saluting Mac-Mahon ‘as he is informed the capture is complete’.241 Contemporaries would have understood the painting as a celebration of Mac-Mahon’s famous words addressed to the British officer: ‘Tell your general that I’m here and that I’m here to stay.’242 Although this anecdote still renders the French as superior, Yvon altogether avoided depicting any allies in his painting. Yvon depicted the Russians defending themselves with picks, shovels and even a ramrod, which stood in contrast to the latest technical development of the French Minié rif les.243 In this specific case, to render the Russians with inferior weapons was 240

241 242 243

In the same year that he finished this painting, in 1858, Vernet married Madame de Boisricheux, the daughter of an English general. See Horace Vernet 1789–1863, exh. cat., Académie de France à Rome and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Rome: De Luca, 1980), 31. The British soldier is recognisable by his red jacket and white trousers. See An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Military Uniforms of the Nineteenth Century, 2010, 26. Identified in Peter Harrington, ‘Painting the Crimean War’, Military Illustrated 109 ( June 1997), 31. ‘Dites à votre général que j’y suis, et que j’y reste.’ Mac-Mahon denied all his life that he had said these words. See Gouttman, 2006, 351. Minié rifles were the last muzzle-loading weapons but had a rifled barrel and a cylindroconical lead bullet that was more reliable and achieved superior penetration and longer range. See Royle, 2000, 92; About observed that the Crimean War was the testing ground

Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857

not far from the historical truth: the ferocious French assault took the enemy by surprise, occurring during a lunch break so that the Russians did not have time to pick up their proper weapons.244 That the Russians were fighting so bravely despite their inadequate equipment made the French victory look even more heroic according to the patriot Loudun: ‘By representing the defeated as being so brave, he aggrandised the victors. These enemies are worthy of the French.’245 Nineteen years later, when Yvon’s official painting could be criticised more openly for its relationship to historical truth, Henry Houssaye was not convinced: ‘In reality, they (the French) do not have much to fight against as the Russians defend themselves rather weakly, much too weakly even for the pictorial effect and for the historical truth.’246 Some critics picked up on Yvon’s downplaying of the Russian achievements. About found the small number of Russian figures suspicious, considering that the French were depicted as intruding into a Russian military base.247 In contrast to the downplaying of the allies, the French zouave regiment in particular was pictorially celebrated: looking at it in 1890, Arsène Alexandre called Yvon’s painting an ‘apotheosis’ of the zouave.248 The experiences of the zouaves during the Crimean War aroused great interest among the French public. By the time of the war, when the regiment consisted mostly of Frenchmen previously stationed in Africa, their exotic uniform was known to everyone.249 That the French soldiers depicted in Yvon’s painting are mainly zouaves might be explained by the fact that zouaves always led the French attacks. However, by the time Lihaut signalled the taking of the Malakoff, the other French regiments should have entered the battle site.250 The pictorial absence of the other French regiments in Yvon’s painting is symptomatic, as it was also only the zouaves’ regiments’ experiences that were published in the form of the new literary genre of the roman militaire.251 Alexandre guessed that every Salon visitor must have had the refrain of a then-popular zouave song in his head when passing Yvon’s painting.252 The fact that Yvon elevated the simple zouave Lihaut to the same level as the celebrated General Mac-Mahon shocked conservative art critics, who condemned the

244 245 246

247 248 249 250 251 252

for the technical innovations displayed at the Universal Exhibition of 1855, the year after the war began. See About, 1858, 331. Royle, 2000, 412. ‘en représentant si braves les vaincus il grandissait les vainqueurs. Ces ennemis sont dignes des Français,’ Loudun, 1857, 18. ‘À la vérité, ils (les Français) n’ont guère à combattre, car les Russes se défendent bien faiblement, – beaucoup trop faiblement même pour l’effet pictural et pour la vérité historique.’ Houssaye, 15 February 1876, 874. About, 1858, 342. Arsène Alexandre, Histoire de la peinture militaire en France (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1889), 274. V. de Mars, ‘Les Zouaves’, Revue des deux mondes 9, no. 2 (March 1855), 1105–1127. I am grateful to Orlando Figes for having pointed this out to me. On the roman militaire under the Second Empire, see Bardon, 1980, 142–144. Alexandre, 1889, 274.

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placing of a common soldier at the same height as a general as trivial.253 But writing for L’Illustration, Du Pays praised this aspect of the painting for showing that the capture of the Malakoff was ‘a victory of soldiers’.254 It is true that, during many operations, it was up to the soldiers to inf luence the outcome of a battle, and not to the generals, whose badly planned strategies often accounted for the large numbers of deaths. Yvon further reversed the hierarchy by showing the capture of the Malakoff from the enemy’s viewpoint. This meant that the most eminent figure of the Crimean War, the commander of the French forces, General Pélissier, was relegated to the background where his presence would be barely noticeable were it not for a tiny French f lag. When Pélissier confronted Yvon about this, the artist simply upheld the historical truth, arguing that the marshal had not been in the field during the capture but had instead watched the assault from where the artist had placed him in the painting.255 Considering that Yvon had accidently depicted Lihaut as holding up the wrong f lag, it seems doubtful that historical truthfulness was really the only underlying rationale for his pictorial solutions. As Peter Harrington points out, Lihaut is holding the f lag of his regiment instead of Marshal Mac-Mahon’s standard, correctly depicted by Vernet.256 Although Yvon’s decision to relegate Pélisser to the background could also have been inf luenced by the fact that the commissioner of the painting, the emperor, had a difficult relationship with Pélissier, it was primarily the viewpoint Yvon had chosen for his painting that restricted him from showing the high command as Langlois did.257 Ignoring MacMahon’s achievements, the artist explained later that he was only able to take the liberty of placing a low-ranking soldier at the centre of the composition because the emperor had not fought during the war and thus did not claim this prominent position for himself.258 Instead of showing Mac-Mahon more prominently, however, Yvon gave further prominence to another lower-ranking French soldier, Colonel Collineau, in the foreground. Critics were fascinated that a man of his rank was immortalised by Yvon’s painting: ‘Colonel Collineau will stay in the memory through this figure in a different way than through all reports: he is no longer just a name, he is a man.’259 That this man who had thus entered the realm of high art was fighting in Africa at the very 253

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258 259

About, 1858, 342; other critics simply ignored the prominent placement of Lihaut, assuming that Yvon must have meant to depict Mac-Mahon as the centre of the composition, Verne, 1857, 288. ‘une victoire des soldats’, Du Pays, 4 July 1857, 6. Cited in Jouin, September 1893, 185. Harrington, June 1997, 32. On the relationship between Napoleon III and Pélissier, see Royle, 2000, 392–393, and Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 417. Jouin, September 1893, 187. ‘Le nom du colonel Collineau restera par cette figure bien autrement vivant dans les mémoires que par tous les bulletins; ce n’est plus un nom, c’est un homme,’ Montaiglon, September 1857, 537.

Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857

moment the Salon visitors would be admiring him at the Salon held a particular appeal for the critics.260 Though the bold move of showing the battle from the enemy’s viewpoint was probably inspired by Langlois, in the context of the high art genre of history painting this reversed narrative was new. The prominent placement of Lihaut shifted the emphasis onto the common soldier and thus the common people. The different centres of action that fragment the viewer’s attention further enhance this democratic notion. Just as Napoleon  III’s eclectic politics aimed at all levels of society, Yvon’s painting also included all ranks of the zouaves regiment, leading About to conclude that Yvon aimed at ‘pleasing at the same time the public of the loges and the (common) shirts of the parterre’.261 Indeed, Yvon’s painting catered not only to several levels of society but also to different political camps. It was intended to appease the fiercest enemies of the French army, the pacifist French public and the anarchists who had threatened the emperor with civil unrest after the disastrous attempt to capture the Malakoff on 18 June 1855. Civry identified these enemies in 1852 as the ones who attack (the army) by speech and by pen […]. Some of them are honest people and innocent dreamers who do not have a taste for battle and believe that by abolishing the army we would abolish war; the others, apostles and champions of anarchy, see in the army an obstacle and wish to eliminate it just as thieves wish to eliminate justice.262 The soldier on the hilltop could be interpreted as the elevation of the common soldier and thus a figure of identification for the common people, appealing to the revolutionary forces. On the other hand, Lihaut is a professional and might be seen as standing for the ‘vivid respect of hierarchy’, which Civry sees embodied in the French soldier.263 The criticism of the artistic shortcomings of Yvon’s Prise shows that the desired propaganda effect did not succeed in impressing the critics. A main concern was that

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‘This brave officer is still today a simple colonel at the head of his regiment returned to Africa.’ (Ce brave officier est encore aujourd’hui simple colonel à la tête de son regiment retourné en Afrique.) Du Pays, 4 July 1857, 6. ‘contenter en même temps le public des loges et les blouses du parterre.’ About, 1858, 342. ‘(des ennemis) qui l’attaquent […] avec la parole et la plume […]. Les uns, honnêtes gens et rêveurs innocents qui ne se sentent aucun goût pour les batailles et qui se figurent qu’en abolissant l’armée on abolirait la guerre; les autres, apôtres et champions de l’anarchie, qui voient dans l’armée un obstacle et qui voudraient la supprimer comme les voleurs voudraient supprimer la Justice,’ Count Eugène de Civry, L’Armée française, sa mission et son histoire: 496–1852 (Paris: Ledoyen, 1852), 135–136. ‘respect vivant de la hiérarchie’, Civry, 1852, 61.

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the heightened ‘realism’ rendered the painting too topical to have an eternal value.264 Charles Baudelaire had already discussed this problem in his Salon review of 1846, other commentators had addressed it in 1855, and Jacob Burckhardt would analyse it later in the century. The literal renderings of uniforms, as Burckhardt would explain in his 1884 discussion of the French military paintings in Versailles, made the paintings too historical and therefore ephemeral, as historical truth, he argued, keeps changing.265 However, critics in 1857 remained silent on this point. While criticising the vérité historique, they did not dare to say that the depicted events might be of no interest to future generations. What critics did mention in 1857, though, was that the commissioners would be to blame if art was not left with the freedom to take on an ‘eternal value’.266 Napoleon III’s interest, however, was precisely in the topicality that would have an immediate political effect on the wider public. The threatening effect that individual elements, such as the dying Russian soldier falling towards the spectator, had on some contemporary viewers was rendered harmless by the static overall composition. In particular, the depiction of some French soldiers created an impression of a ‘triumphal pomp’.267 Although this met About’s principles of a traditional way of composing military painting, it was also judged artificial and theatrical, the staged effect firmly framing and fixing the ephemeral elements.268 The theatricality served to turn this painting into a celebratory triumphal piece and distanced the viewer from the cruelties of the war that were depicted in indi264 265

266 267 268

An exception was Gautier who observed that the figures are looking towards la postérité. See Gautier, 7 November 1857, 145. Jakob Burckhardt, ‘Über erzählende Malerei (1884)’, in Historienmalerei, eds. Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Uwe Fleckner (Berlin: Reimer, 1996), 359–362. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1846’, in Critique d’art suivi de Critique musicale, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 129–132. See for example About, 1858, 335. ‘pompe triomphale’, Gautier, 7 November 1857, 145. This theatricality led About to wonder: ‘So M. Yvon does not know that we (the French army) were repulsed three times?’ (M. Yvon ne sait donc pas que nous avons été repoussés trois fois?) About, 1858, 342. Gautier explained that ‘Painting, an immobile art, cannot render action. The subjects have to pose a little to be credible.’ (La peinture, art immobile, ne peut pas rendre l’action. Il faut que ses sujets posent un peu pour être vraisembables.) Gautier, 7 November 1857, 145. Houssaye would write about Yvon’s painting in 1876: ‘The figures of the foreground are theatrical; the French think more of posing than of battling.’ (Les figures du premier plan sont théâtrales; les Français pensent plus à poser qu’à combattre.) Houssaye, 15 February 1876, 874. But the composition was perceived as more traditional in that it was still more focused than Vernet’s panoramic paintings: ‘At the same time, in spite of the number of episodes, it (Yvon’s painting) has more ensemble and more coherent effect than the large canvases by Horace Vernet, always a little arranged as panorama, and will take its place bravely in Versailles.’ (En même temps, malgré le nombre des épisodes, il [le tableau d’Yvon] a plus d’ensemble et un effet plus un que les grandes toiles d’Horace Vernet, toujours un peu disposées en panorama, et il tiendra vaillamment sa place à Versailles.) Montaiglon, September 1857, 537.

Adolphe Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff at the Salon of 1857

vidual elements of the painting. As we have seen in the positioning of Lihaut, the presentation of the capture of the Malakoff as the final victory over the Russians did not accord with historical truth; it ultimately served to show this chapter of French history as closed and far away. Furthermore, one might argue that Yvon’s implied involvement of the viewer brought the spectator to the distant Crimean Peninsula rather than the soldiers to the Salon. Yvon himself confirmed that his composition ultimately aimed to place the spectator in the Crimea.269 However, the viewer’s identification with the soldiers was somewhat hindered by the dress of the zouaves, rendering the French soldier as exotically different from the Salon visitor. The military strength of France thus remained located in the context of war, seen as far away. The fiercest critic of Yvon’s painting, About, was not convinced by the triumphal elements of the painting, which he still perceived as ‘everyday’, lacking the glory of France: ‘When we let our eyes wander over the large canvas of M. Yvon, we are tempted to turn it around to find the glory of France on the other side.’270 Yvon’s synthesis of old and new meant a break with the pictorial tradition established under the July Monarchy and with the denomination of ‘genre historique’ that critics used in 1855 when discussing Vernet’s paintings. The new terminology used in relation to Yvon’s painting, which was referred to as ‘peinture des circonstances’ or ‘peinture épisodique’, is symptomatic of the novelty of this work which would be the Second Empire’s most important (in terms of costs, scale and critical reception) commission to be hung in the Musée Impérial in Versailles and was seminal for the pictorial rendering of the Second Empire’s writing of history.271 Following the Salon of 1857, the painting received the Médaille d’honneur.272

269 270 271

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Cited in footnote 202. ‘Quand on a promené les yeux sur la grande toile de M. Yvon, l’on est tenté de la retourner sur l’autre face pour y chercher la gloire de la France.’, About, 1858, 341. The importance of the commission was recognised by critics at the time. See for example A.-J. Du Pays, ‘Salon de 1857’, L’Illustration 30, no. 750 (11 July 1857), 23; and About, 1858, 335. The painting was installed in Versailles in 1859. See painting file on Yvon, Prise de la tour de Malakoff, MV1969, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Award ceremony and speeches reprinted in Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 15 avril 1859, 1859, vii–xiv.

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Yvon’s La courtine and La gorge de Malakoff at the Salon of 1859 One cannot accuse great painting (la grande peinture) of being in decline when it devotes three large canvases to the immortalisation of the most significant and epic contemporary event, and with a success that will become universal.273 (Méry 1857, 10) Méry’s enthusiasm when he visited Yvon’s atelier at 54 rue Notre-Dame des Champs,274 a ten-minute walk from the Musée du Luxembourg, in November 1857 anticipates the generally positive shift in perception of Yvon’s œuvre at the Salon of 1859, where he exhibited two other paintings elaborating the capture of the Malakoff. Together with the Prise de Malakoff, both La gorge de Malakoff (Pl. 25) and La courtine de Malakoff (Pl. 26) had been commissioned by the government after the Salon of 1857 to form, as contemporaries called it, a ‘trio’ in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles (Fig. 43). However, before they would find their final destination in Versailles, the paintings played an important role on the public platform of the Salon of 1859 where they reacted to topical public sentiment, as the following reading of their critical reception suggests. Just as the inherent narrative of Prise was not chronological, the trio also laid out the capture of the Malakoff as an ensemble of simultaneous actions. La gorge de Malakoff shows the precarious moment when the French penetrated the inside of the Malakoff after the successful repulse of the Russian guards by Mac-Mahon’s division depicted in Yvon’s first painting.275 It was intended to hang on the left of the Prise in Versailles. At the Salon, however, the painting was first hung on its own in the central room opposite the entrance, thus attracting the undivided attention of the visitors.276 The painting is divided into three discernible zones: the Russian enemy on the left, the French taking up the entire right side of the painting and, thirdly, the city of Sevastopol, its harbour and the sea in the background. General Vinoy dominates the assault by his brigade from a superior position at the right. His commanding posture does not reveal the menace facing his brigade. A battalion of zouaves, voltigeurs of the Imperial Guard and the reserve brigade of General Wimpffen, who is depicted on the left of Vinoy in an animated pose, avert the danger. Wimpffen’s Algerian tirailleurs only enter the stage from the right at this moment, led by Colonel Rose, whose arm is pointing towards the enemy. As in the Prise, the foreground is filled with scattered gabions and corpses. 273

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‘On ne peut reprocher à la grande peinture d’être en décadence, lorsqu’elle consacre trois vastes toiles à immortaliser le plus grand fait épique contemporain, et avec un succès qui deviendra universel.’ Joseph Méry, ‘Les trois tableaux de M. Yvon’, Le Monde illustré 1, no. 33 (28 November 1857), 10. The address of Yvon’s studio is indicated in Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 15 avril 1859, 1859, 343. For a detailed account of the events, see Gouttman, 2006, 353. Du Pays, 11 June 1859, 414.

Yvon’s La courtine and La gorge de Malakoff at the Salon of 1859

The second painting, La courtine de Malakoff, was hung in the central Salon, opposite La gorge, halfway through the exhibition, when Yvon had completed it in May.277 Like La gorge, it illustrates an ambiguous moment in the assault when the French had already taken the Malakoff Tower depicted in the first painting but were repulsed a second time from the Russian defence structure called ‘Petit Redan’, indicated in the background at the right of the painting by an opaque cloud of white smoke. The composition’s focus is the wounded General Bosquet in the foreground who is sitting up arduously on his stretcher to turn towards both his doctor and heaven.278 A dying zouave is lying in front of the stretcher and is despairingly clasping Bosquet’s hand. One of the bearers of the stretcher has fallen dead to the ground, letting the general slip towards the viewer. A group of soldiers is gathered behind the stretcher in a semicircle. Bosquet’s maréchal-des-logis is holding up his f lag, which is already torn by the incessant hail of bullets. At the left of the group, the commander of the engineers, CharlesAuguste Frossard, is hurrying towards Bosquet with a rolled-up message in his hands. The background is populated by the troops Bosquet had mobilised to come to the rescue of the repulsed comrades at the Petit Redan before he was wounded. Most of these divisions’ leaders would be killed moments later, including Souty, depicted on horseback gesticulating towards his men following him in the left middle ground.279 Although only visible in semi-profile, General Mellinet stands out from this mass, bravely exposed on a height and giving orders by holding his sabre in the direction of the Petit Redan. The far left background, where one can make out Lihaut, the French f lag and General Mac-Mahon on top of the already captured Malakoff Tower, connects compositionally with Prise de la tour de Malakoff, which was supposed to hang to the left of La courtine in Versailles. Concluding the trio, the right of La courtine is rendered darker, and most soldiers turn their backs to General Bosquet and the viewer. The two new works repudiate the innovations of Prise de Malakoff. Critics welcomed Yvon’s recourse to focused compositions as a sign of the young artist’s ‘progress’.280 In La gorge, the eye is directed from the left summit to the right before being drawn further in by the perspective lines, finally focusing on the sunlit city of Sevastopol in the distant background. Busquet was captivated by the way this reading direction conveyed the painting’s message instantly: ‘One understands immediately and by one glance that the fate of Sevastopol is decided.’281 The French soldier firing with two pistols at a Russian in the central middle ground was understood as the only potentially distracting episode but was unanimously accepted as ‘well chosen’ for a number of reasons. 277 278 279 280 281

Dumesnil, 1859, 150. Bosquet in fact survived and lived until 1861. See Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1867, s. v. ‘Bosquet.’ On Souty’s destiny see Gouttman, 2006, 352. Paul Mantz, ‘Salon de 1859’, Gazette des beaux-arts 2, no. 3 (1 May 1859), 141. ‘On comprend tout de suite et du premier coup d’œil que le sort de Sébastopol est décidé,’ Alfred Busquet, ‘M. Yvon et ses nouvelles toiles de batailles’, L’Artiste 3 (21 March 1858), 199.

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The soldier’s duel with the Russian symbolised the greater clash of the opposing armies; his almost unrealistic exposure to the deadly fire of the enemy was understood as an ephemeral element of the painting: ‘This detail is washed away by the minute that created it.’282 In Prise, this introduction of the moment in the form of the dying Russian soldier falling head first towards the viewer had been condemned as too threatening. Here, the soldier is stoically resisting death, he is French and he is relegated to the middle ground. In this spot he serves to lead the viewer’s gaze into the grand narrative of the capture of the city rather than deterring him and thus removing his attention from the main message of the painting, as was the case in Prise. Yvon likewise atoned for the confusingly vague hierarchy of Prise by placing General Vinoy in an elevated position, rivalled only by the French f lag at the right margin, where he was indeed recognised as the principal figure of the painting by contemporaries. In La courtine, the conventional focus on the high command and the clear composition likewise seem anachronistic considering the innovations Yvon had introduced with Prise. According to the academic principles prescribed for history paintings, nothing in the painting distracts from the central scene in the foreground and the high command’s, namely Bosquet’s, prominent position.283 The solemn scene is f looded by transcendent light.284 The only notable episode, the zouave theatrically clinging on to Bosquet’s hand, was hailed by critics as adding to the sentimentality of the moment. While Lihaut’s prominent placement in Prise seemed scandalous, this zouave also assumes a foreground position but remains anonymous and could not be rendered more submissive. While Lihaut was proudly upholding the f lag of France, this zouave is devotedly holding onto his superior’s hand from beneath the stretcher. The focused compositions and the episodes, which are single, clear-cut moments and not multiple incidents as in Prise, resulted in a pictorial withdrawal from the viewer. The similarly ‘realist’ elements, although placed in the foreground as in Prise, do not encroach upon the viewer’s space but are rather separated from the viewer by an emptier foreground. Auvray remarked that it changed the viewer’s confrontation with the painting: ‘The combatants are separated by a space the width of which does not permit them to attack with their bayonets.’285 Framed in a conventional composition, the piles of cadavers in the foreground of La gorge were hailed as its most picturesque aspect. Yvon had prepared the different poses of the dead corpses in detailed preliminary figure stud-

282 283 284 285

‘Ce détail est emporté par la minute qui le crée’, Méry, 28 November 1857, 10. Louis Auvray, Exposition des beaux-arts: Salon de 1859 (Paris: Librairie d’Alphonse Taride, 1859), 36. Du Pays, 11 June 1859, 414. ‘les combattants sont séparés par un espace qui ne permet pas de s’aborder à la baïonnette.’ Auvray, 1859, 16.

Yvon’s La courtine and La gorge de Malakoff at the Salon of 1859

Fig. 39:  Adolphe Yvon, Étude préparatoire pour La gorge de Malakoff, c. 1858, chalk on paper, 26 × 37.5 cm, Inv. dessins 594, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

ies, leading to a striking variety of perspective foreshortening and arrangement in the depiction of the bodies (see, for example, Fig. 39).286 Du Pays observed: When it came to painting the piles of corpses at the entrance of the canyon, M. Yvon became free again; he could invent, and choose the disposition that would suit him best. Also it is in this part of the painting that he recovered his independence, and where he particularly manifested picturesque qualities.287 The artistic liberty Du Pays mentioned was largely rendered possible because the official war accounts, which Yvon was bound to reference, naturally remained silent on the dead. This liberty allowed art-historical references to First Empire history paintings such as the homoerotic connotations of the wounded Colonel Roques’ languid gesture in the centre, which is similar to that of the wounded Mameluke who is sinking to the

286 287

There are 234 preliminary drawings for La courtine and La gorge, inv. nos. 360–594, Drawings, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. ‘Quant à l’entassement des cadavres, à l’entrée de la gorge, M. Yvon redevenait libre; il pouvait inventer, choisir telle disposition qui lui conviendrait. Aussi est-ce dans cette partie du tableau où il retrouvait son indépendance, qu’il a, selon nous, particulièrement manifesté des qualités pittoresques.’ Du Pays, 11 June 1859, 302.

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Fig. 40:  Adolphe Yvon, Étude préparatoire pour La gorge de Malakoff, c. 1858, chalk on paper, 37.5 × 26.4 cm, Inv. dessins 528, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

ground in Girodet’s Révolte du Caire le 21 octobre 1798 (1810).288 The device of piles of dead corpses in the painting’s foreground further references Gros’ arranged bodies in the foregrounds of Eylau and Jaffa.289 But whereas the dead are restricted to a small pile in Eylau and are cast in shadow in Jaffa, the corpses in Yvon’s painting cover the entire foreground and are sunlit. The resulting immediacy, however, is both contained within the conventional composition and diminished by poetic elements such as the zouave holding a fife who, as Busquet observed, distracts the viewer’s attention from the ‘scene of carnage’.290 The synthesis of thorough preparatory studies and art-historical refer-

288

289 290

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Révolte du Caire le 21 octobre 1798, 1810, oil on canvas, 365 × 500 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. On the homorerotic implications of Girodet’s painting, see Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 132–155. For details on the paintings, see Chapter I, footnote 84 and Chapter III, footnote 132. ‘A young zouave sargeant plays the fife frantically to entertain his comrades. This incredible hero, by distracting the spectator’s gaze from the scene of carnage that is happening before his eyes, is one of the great feats of this composition, much better received than the painting of 1857.’ (Un jeune sergent de zouaves joue du fifre avec frénésie pour animer ses camarades. Cet incroyable héros, en distrayant l’œil du spectateur de la scène de carnage qui se passe sous ses yeux, est une des grandes habiletés de cette composition, beaucoup mieux entendue que le tableau de 1857.) Busquet, 21 March 1858, 199–200.

Yvon’s La courtine and La gorge de Malakoff at the Salon of 1859

ences expressed, according to critics, an ‘arresting vérité’ and rendered these otherwise gruesomely immediate depictions of death heroic.291 Cadol saw a direct link between this kind of depiction of death and the glory of the French army, exclaiming when discussing Yvon’s La gorge: ‘Death and glory!’292 Embedded in conventional modes of depiction, elements such as the Russian faces, formerly dubbed ‘vulgar’ and repulsively ugly in Prise, were acceptable in 1859. The preparatory drawings Yvon made for these Russian faces, however, still reveal the same will to render the enemy inferior by lack of human traits. In particular, the Russian in the bottom left corner of La gorge bears a closer resemblance to a beast than a human being in both the study and the final painting (Fig. 40). But in general, the Russian enemy blends in with the Russian terrain that the French wish to conquer. The brown cloth of the Russian infantry’s greatcoats does not catch the eye as readily as the colourful French uniforms; whereas in Prise the Russian enemy was still discomfortingly prominent, he only occupies the foreground of La gorge when dead and does not appear in La courtine at all. Despite this Russian absence, La gorge was nevertheless praised for showing that ‘the Russians’ vigorous resistance must have often come to resemble an offensive’; this might be because the sheer presence of the two new Malakoff paintings raised the fact that the French encountered resistance at sites other than the Malakoff Tower although the tower had already been captured.293 The revocation of pictorial innovations is no coincidence. A letter written to the Ministère d’État on 26 February 1858, the year he was working on the two additional Malakoff paintings, reveals that Yvon was thinking about ways to endow his paintings with more heroism. He declared that he was interested in ‘a new effort towards Great Painting (la grande peinture), which lies so abandoned today although it is one of the exclusive glories of France, and to reconnect the thread broken in the hands of the masters the country is so honoured to count as its own.’294 The paintings he named as examples to follow were Entrée d’Henri IV à Paris. 22 Mars 1594 (Salon of 1817; Fig. 41) and

291 292 293

294

‘vérité saisissante’, Du Pays, 11 June 1859, 414. ‘La mort et la gloire!’ Édouard Cadol, ‘Revue du Salon de 1859: Peintres de batailles’, L’Univers illustré 2 (7 May 1859), 182. ‘la vigoureuse résistance des Russes a dû prendre souvent les allures de l’offensive’, A. de Belloy, ‘Salon de 1859’, L’Artiste 6 (17 April 1859), 242. Similarly, Méry praised Yvon’s new paintings for showing the Russians’ ‘noble qualities of defence’ (nobles qualités de défenses.). Méry, 28 November 1857, 10. ‘un nouvel effort à la grande peinture si abandonnée de nos jours, bien qu’elle soit une des gloires exclusives de la France, et renouer le fil des grandes traditions brisé aux mains des maîtres dont le pays s’honore.’ Yvon expressed these thoughts at the same time as he was working on La gorge and La courtine but in relation to a sketch representing the Battle of Inkermann, which he attached to the letter. The painting of the Inkermann was probably never finished. See Yvon to ministre d’État, letter of 24 February 1858, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 54.

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Fig. 41:  François Gérard, Entrée d’Henri IV à Paris. 22 mars 1594, 1817, oil on canvas, 510 × 958 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Bataille d’Austerlitz. 2 décembre 1805 (Salon of 1810; Fig. 42) by François Gérard (1770– 1837); both hung in the Galeries des Batailles in Versailles when Yvon was working on his paintings destined for Versailles.295 Gérard’s paintings resemble the two new Malakoff paintings in terms of size, composition and colour. In both Gérard’s Bataille d’Austerlitz and Yvon’s La courtine, the centre of the painting is the compositional and thematic focus, further emphasised by the light, which gradually dims towards the edges. One could argue that Gérard’s Entrée d’Henri IV is divided into similarly clear zones as Yvon’s La gorge, with a triangle starting at the lower corners pointing towards the main subjects of the paintings – Henri IV in the former and Sevastopol in the latter. By choosing Gérard’s works as examples, Yvon linked his works to the successful First Empire artist. Henri IV was used as an object lesson since its completion in 1817 for the drawing of the figures and Bataille d’Austerlitz was praised for its vérité.296 Apart from these artistic concerns, the fundamental changes in the two new Malakoff paintings might also have been politically motivated. Shown in the same year

295 296

See Eudore Soulié, Notice des peintures et sculptures composant le Musée Impérial de Versailles: 1er et 2e étages (Versailles: Imprimerie de Montalant-Bougleux, 1855), 289, 301. Napoleon I reputedly asked his officers to view it at the Salon of 1810, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1872, s. v. ‘Gérard’; Bataille d’Austerlitz was painted for the Tuileries but eventually hung, unfinished, in the Galeries des Batailles in Versailles in 1835, see Yveline Cantarel-Besson, ‘La peinture napoléonienne’, in Napoléon: Images et histoire: Peinture du château de Versailles (1789–1815), eds. Yveline Cantarel-Besson, Claire Constans, and Bruno Foucart (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001), 74.

Yvon’s La courtine and La gorge de Malakoff at the Salon of 1859

Fig. 42:  François Gérard, Bataille d’Austerlitz. 2 décembre 1805, 1810, oil on canvas, 510 × 958 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

that Napoleon III and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia were leading their troops against the Austrian Empire during the Second Italian War of Independence, Yvon’s paintings were understood by the public as examples for the troops stationed in Italy.297 Indeed, Yvon’s rendering of the high command and lower ranks of the French army was acknowledged as exemplary. The suffering central figure of Bosquet in La courtine demonstrated that ‘the superior officers share the danger and privations of the soldier’.298 The notion of the suffering of the high command solved the problem of including in the paintings of the Crimean War high-ranking generals, whose tactical errors often accounted for the unsuccessful battles. As Bardon has pointed out, many Crimean War paintings showed the higher ranks as either dead, wounded or visiting the wounded as in Rigo’s Le général Canrobert venant visiter une tranchée (Pl. 14).299 Arguably, despite his regression to conventions, Yvon went further in the immediacy of the depiction of death and endowed some of the dead soldiers in the foreground of his paintings with the recognisable features of high-ranking officers who had died in the combat – for example, the chief of the twenty-seventh bataillon Iratsoqui in the central foreground of La gorge. It was the suffering of the generals, rather than any notable action, that rendered them heroes and united them symbolically with the common soldier, who had apparently endured the same.

297 298 299

Émile de la Bédollière, ‘La gorge de Malakoff ’, L’Univers illustré (14 May 1859). ‘les chefs partagent le danger et les privations du soldat’, Auvray, 1859, 37. Bardon, 1980, 119.

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Apart from the high ranks, other subjects that Yvon had needed to avoid in 1857 now featured in the new Malakoff paintings; for example, the prominent placement in La courtine of General Mellinet, who was wounded in the first attempt to capture the Malakoff on 18 June 1855, would have been difficult in 1857.300 Then, any reference to the disastrous 18 June 1855 assault, when the French army suffered enormous losses, leading to a public outcry to end the war, had to be avoided; however, General Mellinet’s inclusion in La courtine could be interpreted as the final victory over public opinion against the war. The depiction of the city of Sevastopol as in La gorge would perhaps also have raised criticism in 1857, since only the French saw its capture as a victory over the Russians while the Russians themselves and the British allies did not. The fact that the city was never actually captured by the French but rather evacuated by the Russians before the French army entered it is diplomatically circumvented by Yvon’s focus on the struggle at the Malakoff, with Sevastopol merely in the background. Just as the depiction of the city of Sevastopol was now hailed as ‘the promised land is in sight’, the suffering Bosquet became ‘the Achilles of the siege’ whereas, before, every person in charge during the siege had been blamed for the great losses.301 By linking Bosquet to the greatest warrior of Homer’s Iliad who died of a small wound to his heel, the only vulnerable part of his body, Méry not only ennobled Bosquet but also separated his suffering, and by extension that of the army, from the suspicion of bad warfare. Although zouaves do figure prominently in La gorge and La courtine as they had done in Prise, they are this time mainly of Algerian origin. As a comment by Auvray, who welcomed Yvon’s depiction, demonstrates, the Algerian zouave was now discussed, as any Exotic Other would have been discussed at the time. Auvray praised Yvon for having depicted the Algerian recruit as capable of emotions, linking him to the French army’s moral superiority, which had a positive inf luence on him and taught him not to be corrupt: ‘He (Yvon) expresses a sentiment unknown in the foreign armies: he paints the soldier’s love, affection. In France one does not buy one’s ranks; each one has to gain them on the field of battle.’302 Auvray’s statement suggests that the depiction of the submissive Algerian zouaves created a cohesive sense of French national identity and effectively displaced the problems of hierarchy that critics had located in Prise.303

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Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1873, s. v. ‘Mellinet.’ ‘la terre promise est en vue’, ‘l’Achille du siége’, Méry, 28 November 1857, 10. ‘Il (Yvon) exprime un sentiment inconnu dans les armées étrangères: il peint l’amour, l’affection du soldat. C’est qu’en France on n’achète pas ses grades, c’est que chacun doit les gagner sur le champ de bataille.’ Auvray, 1859, 37. On how French representations in Napoleonic battle paintings of the 1798 Egyptian Campaign onwards display an attempt to displace post-Revolutionary problems and resolve social divisions to boost a cohesive sense of national identity around common colonial projects, see Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

Yvon’s Malakoff trio in the Salle de Crimée

These considerations about the political rationales of Yvon’s recourse to the grand tradition of history painting become less hypothetical in the light of the letter of 24 February 1858 quoted above, in which the artist not only stated his admiration for François Gérard but also contemplated the political implications of his work.304 When discussing his never-finished Battle of Inkerman, he attributed a diplomatic impact to this painting, arguing that the inclusion of British soldiers in the painting would benefit the relationship between France and Britain. Whether the political implications of the Malakoff paintings realised their potential entirely depended on their public reception. In general, the enormous size, prominent placement, political topicality and entertaining aspects of the three Malakoffs made them crowd-pullers at the Salons of 1857 and 1859. While the pictorial innovations of the 1857 Prise rendered the military strength of France as immediate and thus convincing, the references to First Empire history painting in the two following paintings inserted the Crimean military achievements into history. Even though some critics were still unconvinced of the value of Yvon’s works as history paintings, public and critics alike were persuaded by the accuracy of this presentation of the war, rendering Yvon’s paintings a powerful extension of Napoleon III’s populist politics.305 In art-historical terms we know, thanks to the 1858 letter, that Yvon himself intended a retreat to a more established pictorial language of history painting. Drawing on First Empire paintings such as those by Gérard and Gros, Yvon achieved the unity of composition that critics had asked for when confronted with the multiple centres of attention in Prise. Nevertheless, as the portraits of the corpses in the foreground of his two later paintings demonstrate, he continued to adhere to vividly ‘real’ details. La gorge and La courtine de Malakoff hence display a return to tradition but do not sacrifice entirely the innovations of Prise painted two years earlier.

Yvon’s Malakoff trio in the Salle de Crimée The ultimate historical value of Yvon’s paintings was only fully unfolded in Versailles, where the three paintings were supposed to be the magnum opus of the Salle de Crimée, occupying an entire wall, with the Prise de Malakoff in the centre. Critics discussing Yvon’s two additional paintings in 1859 knew that Yvon had produced them to match Prise and construct a narrative about the capture of the Malakoff for the Musée Impérial in Versailles. Shortly after the Salon of 1857 had closed, Yvon met with the Versailles architect Charles-Auguste Questel to discuss the hanging of his three paintings.306 This

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Yvon to Ministre d’État, 24 February 1858, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 54. For example, Dumesnil, attributing the importance of Yvon’s paintings merely to what is depicted and not how it is depicted, acknowledged the historical value of the figures, letting them exclaim: ‘We are ancestors!’ (Nous sommes des ancêtres!) Dumesnil, 1859, 149–150. Yvon to ministre d’État, 19 October 1857, Archives des musées nationaux V2.

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was two years before Soulié came up with the final hanging plan for the Salle de Crimée, and it seems Yvon was either unaware that there would be a room solely dedicated to the Crimean War or opposed the plan. As we can gather from a letter he sent to Achille Fould after his meeting, it became clear that the height of the three paintings precluded their placement in any room other than the Salle du Maroc.307 Although this room would indeed eventually be chosen, Yvon’s most ambitious wishes would never be satisfied; namely, to see his three paintings hanging on their own on one wall of this room, faced only by a then-planned Malakoff painting by Vernet, and the renaming of the room as the ‘Salle de Sébastopol’, thus emphasising the particular subject matter of Yvon’s paintings. After the Salon’s closure, Yvon’s paintings were hung on the long east wall. Soulié envisaged in his 1859 plan that La Gorge should hang to the left and La Courtine to the right of Prise de la Tour de Malakoff, an arrangement that would have made sense geographically as the Petit Redan displayed in La Courtine was in reality located east of the Malakoff (Fig. 43). However, the postcard of the Salle de Crimée (Fig. 25) suggests that this arrangement was eventually reversed and that  La Courtine  hung to the left of Prise, at least toward the end of the nineteenth century. Also discernable in the postcard is a key that hung underneath Yvon’s Prise, presumably the same one that hung underneath the painting at the Salon. As discussed earlier, ten of Durand-Brager’s views of Sevastopol were hung underneath La gorge and La courtine, thereby serving as supporting illustrations of the terrain on which Yvon’s combats were fought. Although Yvon’s vision of exclusively sharing a room with Vernet, the greatest military painter of the past three decades, was never realised, the hanging of Yvon’s three paintings on one long wall nevertheless referenced Vernet’s trio of the capture of Constantine of 13 November 1837, commissioned in 1838 and shown at the Salon in 1839, and now in the nearby Salle de Constantine (Fig. 44; Fig. 26).308 The underlying propaganda aims of the commissioning governments of Vernet’s and Yvon’s trios were similar, as were the formal pictorial solutions. The capture of Constantine depicted in Vernet’s trio was successful only at the second attempt, as was the capture of the Malakoff. In both trios, the animated combats to the left and right are stabilised by the central canvas showing a final assault or victory. They differ in that the chronological sequence of Yvon’s canvases is more tightened as the moments depicted in each one are only separated by a few hours whereas the events shown in Vernet’s trio are separated by several days.309 Furthermore, the central canvas of Vernet’s trio shows the final 307 308

309

Yvon to ministre d’État, 19 October 1857, Archives des musées nationaux V2. Hornstein points out that Yvon’s paintings were supposed to reference Vernet’s Constantine trio. See Hornstein, 2010, 303. On Vernet’s Constantine series, see furthermore Vandenbrouck-Przybylski, 2009, 99–115. The narrative strategy of Siege de Constantine has been analysed in Susan L. Siegfried, ‘Alternative Narratives’, Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013), 117–122; Michael Marrinan, ‘Schauer der Eroberung’, in Bilder der Macht – Macht der Bilder: Zeitgeschichte in Darstellungen

Yvon’s Malakoff trio in the Salle de Crimée

assault as the last stage of the siege whereas Yvon’s central painting illustrates what the French government sought to present as the final victory over the Russians: the actual capture of the Malakoff. Perhaps the governments of Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III both chose the format of a trio for the depiction of these incomplete victories because they seem to attain historical accuracy by illustrating the struggles involved in the adjacent paintings. More than Vernet’s, Yvon’s trio works as a whole, again referencing Langlois’ panorama. Yvon’s series seems visually more coherent than Vernet’s as the paintings are connected by the same height of horizon line. Inspired by Langlois’ Sevastopol panorama, Yvon’s canvases are, strictly speaking, supposed to surround the viewer: Sevastopol on the left should be behind us when we look at the central painting showing the Malakoff. The right-hand painting, however, departs from this circular movement. By repeating the Malakoff Tower, with Lihaut and Mac-Mahon already depicted in the central painting on the left margin, the painting shows the struggle at the Malakoff from a viewpoint from where the high command would have seen it.310 Another difference in the presentation of Yvon’s trio was that, whereas Vernet’s paintings were painted to be embedded into a gilded decorative programme, Yvon had asked for these decorations to be taken down and for the walls to be painted a uniform colour.311 According to Yvon’s suggestion, the Salle de Crimée would have functioned more as an art museum space than the historicising Gesamtkunstwerk of the Salle de Constantine. When the three Malakoff paintings were hung between 1859 and 1860, however, the ceiling painted under the supervision of Vernet illustrating the Moroccan Campaign of 1844 that had been in the Salle du Maroc, remained.312 That way, Yvon’s paintings entered a visual dialogue with the œuvre of his artistic role model. Still, this visual dialogue was only effective for the visitor who cared to look all the way up to Vernet’s decorative programme. Whereas, at the Salon, Yvon’s individual paintings had seemed incomplete, they united in the Salle de Crimée to form one artwork.313 Méry noted that only at Versailles,

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des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. Stefan Germer and Michael F. Zimmermann (Munich and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997), 267–295; and Hornstein, 2010, 205–220. Hornstein discusses Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff (not the two later paintings of the Malakoff ) as referencing Langlois’ panorama devices and comes to the conclusion that it failed to create the same illusion. See Hornstein, 2010, 301. ‘The ornamental strips and mouldings will be removed and painted in a uniform tone.’ (Les frises et entablements seraient supprimés et peints en un ton uniforme.) Yvon to ministre d’État, letter of 19 October 1857, Archives des musées nationaux V2. Visible in the postcard (Fig. 25) and mentioned in Soulié, 1860, vol. 2, 87. ‘It (La gorge) will have a less vague significance once reunited with the other pages of that Crimean expedition, of which the museum of Versailles will soon enfold the entire poem.’ (Elle ne prendra une signification un peu moins vague qu’une fois réunie aux autres pages de cette expédition de Crimée, dont le musée de Versailles étalera bientôt le poëme complet.) Belloy, 17 April 1859, 242.

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Fig. 43:  Adolphe Yvon, Malakoff paintings as hung in Salle de Crimée, Versailles, in 1860.

which was the ‘library’ for paintings, would these ‘pages’ be united to form a complete book about the capture of the Malakoff.314 Only when seen together did they create a narrative tension, which contemporaries much appreciated as it emphasised the French troops’ achievements in holding the French position on the Malakoff Tower despite ‘this movement by the enemy (which) can compromise or delay the victory’.315 That the Malakoff Tower had to be defended against the enemy stationed at the defensive structures to the right and left also explains the diverging movement of the French troops towards the margins of the trio, which directs the viewer’s attention beyond the pictures’ frames.

Fig. 44:  Horace Vernet, Siège de Constantine, 1838, oil on canvas, 512 × 518 cm, 512 × 1039 cm, 512 × 518 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. 314

315

‘The museum of Versailles is a library of painting: if posterity wants to read about the Malakoff there, it must find a book, with all its pages.’ (Le Musée de Versailles est la bibliothèque de la peinture: la postérité qui voudra y lire Malakoff, doit trouver le livre, avec tous ses feuillets.) Méry, 28 November 1857, 10. ‘ce mouvement de l’ennemi (qui) peut compromettre ou retarder la victoire’, Méry, 28 November 1857, 10.

Yvon’s Malakoff trio in the Salle de Crimée

Outside the trio’s picture frames, the other artworks united in the Salle de Crimée complemented Yvon’s trio, which was naturally the principal work in terms of subject and size. According to Soulié’s plan, four busts of eminent generals present at the capture of the Malakoff were supposed to be lined up in front of it, arranged according to importance and whether or not they were still alive (Pl. 10). These marble busts, literally set in stone, represent the ultimate medium through which to ennoble individuals without having to show their supposed deeds. The busts of General Pontevès and General Saint-Pol, who both died during the assault, were placed at the trio’s margins while the busts of Marshals Bosquet and Pélissier were positioned to either side of Prise.316

316

On Jules de Saint-Pol see Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1875, s. v. ‘Saint-Pol’; on Jean-Baptiste-Edmond Pontevès see Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 12, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1874), s. v. ‘Pontevès.’

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While the merging of Yvon’s three paintings showing the strategy of the high command at least indirectly expressed, as Méry noted, ‘the victorious plan of the commanderin-chief ’, Pélissier, one might argue that his bust also attempted to make amends for the fact that Yvon had not included the commander-in-chief in his paintings.317 However, the actual hero of the Salle de Crimée was General Bosquet. The next section considers the artworks dedicated to this leader of the zouave regiment, with a particular focus on the major commission to Pils who commemorated the general’s deeds at the Battle of the Alma.

General Bosquet’s ‘mouvement tournant’ in Pils’ 1861 Bataille de l’Alma The planned Salle de Crimée was a blatant glorification of Bosquet (Marshal since 18 March 1856), who was represented three times in this room: severe and strong-minded in Vernet’s large full-length portrait, immortalised and decorated in Nieuwerkerke’s white marble bust and stoically suffering in Yvon’s La courtine (Fig. 45; Fig. 46; Pl. 26). While these character traits might have been well suited to the translation into fine arts, the French public venerated Bosquet more for his unpretentiously close bond with the common soldiers. His ardent commitment to strengthening his men’s morale during the harsh Crimean winter of 1854/55 reputedly earned him the ‘love of the soldiers’.318 His spontaneous and insightful decisions exploiting the special mountainfighting skills of his zouaves were central to nearly all the successful outcomes of the Crimean battles.319 None of these achievements were, however, visualised in the numerous paintings of the battles of the Alma, Inkerman and Malakoff intended for the Salle de Crimée, which, as we have seen, often foregrounded the high command instead. Pils was the first artist to visualise Bosquet’s close bond with his troops and his outstanding achievement in La Bataille de l’Alma (Salon of 1861), finding pictorial solutions which ‘democratised’ military painting (Fig. 47).320 The painting is not yet listed in Soulié’s plan of the Salle de Crimée of 1859 but was probably hung there after its com317 318

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‘le plan victorieux du général en chef ’, Méry, 28 November 1857, 10. ‘Marshal Bosquet is one of the grand military figures of our epoch […]. His affectuous manners, his justice, his benevolence for merit, the care he took of the health of his troops, did not contribute less than his courage and talents to gain him the love of the soldiers.’ (Le maréchal Bosquet est une des grandes figures militaire de notre époque […]. Ses manières affectueuses, sa justice, sa bienveillance pour le mérite, le soin qu’il prenait de la santé des troupes, n’ont pas moins contribué que son courage et ses talents à lui attirer l’amour des soldats.) Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1867, s. v. ‘Bosquet.’ Figes, 2010, 209; Gouttman, 2006, 217, 269; Dictionnaire des maréchaux de France: Du Moyen âge à nos jours, ed. Geneviève Maze-Sencier (Paris: Perrin, 1988), 97. Immediately after his overwhelming success with Débarquement en Crimée at the Salon of 1857, the government commissioned Pils on 17 July 1857 for the sum of 20,000 francs. See Archives nationales F21/103 dossier 17.

General Bosquet’s ‘mouvement tournant’ in Pils’ 1861 Bataille de l’Alma

Fig. 45:  Horace Vernet, Portrait en pied de S. Exc. M. le maréchal Bosquet, 1857, oil on canvas, 219 × 143 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Fig. 46:  Alfred-Émilien Comte de Nieuwerkerke, Pierre-Joseph-François Bosquet, 1857, marble, 75 × 60 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

pletion, as an annotation in the 1860 catalogue of Versailles suggests.321 Like all paintings of the Salle de Crimée, it is not on view today. The enormous painting (five by nine metres) focuses on the moment when Bosquet and his regiment started to scale the Alma heights, where they would overpower the surprised Russians. The struggle of scaling the heights destroys any military formation: in the midst of his regiment on the left, Bosquet is wading through the water on horseback. His artillery troops are strenuously pushing up the cannons on the right, accompanied by drummers from the Algerian tirailleurs regiment.322 The French and British high commands, which were shown 321

322

Although all the paintings that Soulié had included in his 1859 plan of the Salle de Crimée hung by 1860, he remarked in 1860 that the room was not yet complete. See Soulié, 1860, vol. 2, 87; by 1881, Pils’ painting hung in the Salle de Crimée, as it is listed in the next document we have of the hanging in Versailles. See Ris, 1881, 37; it still hung in the Salle de Crimée in 1896. See André Pératé and Pierre de Nolhac, Le Musée National de Versailles: Description du château et des collections (Paris: Maison Ad. Braun et Cie., 1896), 375. Light infantry trained to skirmish ahead of the main columns, also recruited from Algeria, 1842–1964. See Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1876, s. v. ‘tirailleur.’

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Fig. 47:  Isidore Pils, Bataille de l’Alma (20 septembre 1854), 1857, oil on canvas, 500 × 900 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

Fig. 48:  Isidore Pils, Bataille de l’Alma, 1872, watercolour, 2.90 × 4.70 cm. Reproduced in Sotheby’s sale catalogue, Monaco, 15 June 1990, lot 130 (present whereabouts unknown).

General Bosquet’s ‘mouvement tournant’ in Pils’ 1861 Bataille de l’Alma

Fig. 49:  Isidore Pils, Bataille de l’Alma, 1855, oil sketch, 625 × 101.5 cm (with frame), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille.

in the other paintings in the foreground, are now relegated to the background, their visibility merely serving to embed Bosquet’s action in the overall course of battle. By the time Pils completed this painting, Bosquet’s order at the Battle of the Alma had become famous as the mouvement tournant du général Bosquet, as he attacked the enemy from the f lank instead of frontally as previously stipulated in the plan of battle. Pils illustrated just this moment, when Bosquet’s regiment has arrived at the bottom of the Alma heights and starts to turn left to climb up the hills from the side where the Russians did not expect them. By placing the viewer at the peak of this turn, Pils presents Bosquet’s division as moving towards the viewer, who is able to see Bosquet frontally; but the division is also moving away from the viewer, whose gaze follows the zouaves’ advance up the hill on the right. Pils’ preliminary sketches for the painting demonstrate that he attached great importance to the ‘down-to-earth’ placement of Bosquet. In an early oil sketch, Bosquet is shown in the upper part of the composition towering above his soldiers, driving them through the Alma River from his commanding position on horseback (Fig. 49). In a second sketch, Pils changed the composition completely and integrated Bosquet wading through the water with his soldiers as in the final painting (Fig. 50). It is important to note that the viewpoints in each version are different. In the first sketch, the viewer is construed as looking up at Bosquet from the riverbed. In the second sketch, the viewer is constructed as closer but still hovering above the scene, and in the final

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Fig. 50:  Isidore Pils, Bataille de l’Alma, n. d., pastel sketch, 39.8 × 73.3 cm. Reproduced in Christie’s sale catalogue, Monaco, 30 June 1995, lot 158 (present whereabouts unknown).

painting we are only slightly above, emblematically near eye level with the general, who became famous for his empathy with his troops. Thus viewer, soldiers and general are on one level. Although Léon Lagrange remarked stubbornly: ‘Where no one is fighting, I refuse to see a battle’, and despite the much commented on absence of the enemy in this painting entitled Bataille de l’Alma, critics upheld it as the only history painting present at the Salon of 1861.323 The entire scene was judged an ‘episode’ rather than a battle. As this episode was the decisive moment in the outcome of the Battle of the Alma, exclusively showing Bosquet’s famous ‘mouvement tournant’, it replaced the narrative approach of Vernet’s and Yvon’s paintings.324 Becq de Fouquières, the curator of an 1876 Pils retrospective, compared Bosquet’s ascent of the Alma Heights to Hannibal’s ascent of the Alps, arguing that, just as a depiction of the latter would never be called anecdotal, so this one should be understood as historically charged.325 Although the composition might seem strikingly modern to us, it was accepted as part of the canon 323 324

325

‘Où personne ne se bat je me refuse à voir une bataille’, Léon Lagrange, ‘Le Salon de 1861 (3e article)’, Gazette des beaux-arts 10 (15 June 1861), 323. ‘It is not […] a battle, since one does not fight at all, but a great war manoeuvre, irresistible and decisive, admirably appropriate for painting,’ ( ‘Ça n’est pas […] une bataille, puisqu’on ne s’y bat point, mais une grande manœuvre de guerre irrésistible et décisive, admirablement propre à la peinture’) Théophile Gautier, Abécédaire du Salon de 1861 (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), 373. L. Becq de Fouquières, Isidore-Alexandre-Auguste Pils, sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Charpentier, 1876), 31.

General Bosquet’s ‘mouvement tournant’ in Pils’ 1861 Bataille de l’Alma

of high art because it resembled works by Raphael (1483–1520) and Charles Le Brun (1619–1690). Contemporaries recognised that the river bordering the lower margin of the painting and the figures’ upward movement to the right margin referenced Raphael’s Vatican fresco of the Battle of Constantine versus Maxentius (1520–1524) and, as Annie Bardon has noted, resembled even more closely Le Brun’s Passage de Granique (c. 1673).326 Within this ensemble, the figures depicted were rendered remarkably lifelike. Not having travelled to the Crimea himself, Pils spent several months at the military school in Vincennes near Paris to study uniforms and soldiers.327 The result is that, in the final painting, the physiognomies, uniforms and facial expressions are rendered in crisp detail, which was considered as surpassing even Vernet’s realism, as Laurent-Pichat noted: ‘He (Pils) understands him (the soldier) with more reality than Vernet himself.’328 The actions and poses such as the turco getting water at the lower right margin of the painting and the drummers seen from behind clumsily ascending the hill, unusual for battle paintings, individualised them and added to the figures’ lifelike impression. Rather than the notion of historical truth discussed in relation to Yvon’s Prise in 1857, Pils’ lifelike figures were seen as entering the realm of ‘real life’. Gautier enthused about Pils: He puts a soul beneath their uniform and gives each one a character. His heads are not, as one says, têtes de chic; they represent a human individuality, while entirely keeping the military stamp. These are not vague minor characters, as they are too often rendered by military painters. You can look at them one by one, they all interest you: they live, they think and they act.329 Gautier’s assessment indicates that the variety in movement, facial expression and physical features individualised the figures more than Yvon’s many portraits had been able

326

327 328 329

Charles Le Brun, Le Passage du Granique, c. 1673, oil on canvas, 470 × 1209 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Lagrange, 15 June 1861, 323; Bardon, 1980, 114; Henri Delaborde, Mélanges sur l’art contemporain (Paris: Vve J. Renouard, 1866), 873. The Vatican fresco was probably painted by Giulio Romano (c. 1499–1546) and other assistants based on Raphael’s design. However, Pils’ contemporaries referred to it as painted by Raphael. Houssaye later accepted Pils’ painting as nevertheless showing a battle: ‘If one does not battle in a hand-to-hand fight, it is not less a battle.’ (Si on ne se bat pas corps à corps dans cette bataille, ce n’est pas moins une bataille.) Houssaye, 15 February 1876, 886. Fouquières, 1876, 28. ‘Il (Pils) le comprend avec plus de réalité que H. Vernet lui-même.’ Léon Laurent-Pichat, Notes sur le Salon de 1861 (Lyon: L’Imprimerie du Progrès, 1861), 3. ‘Il met une âme sous leur uniforme et donne à chacun un caractère. Ses têtes ne sont pas, comme on dit, des têtes de chic; elles représentent une individualité humaine, tout en gardant le cachet militaire. Ce ne sont pas de vagues comparses ainsi qu’en font trop souvent les peintres de bataille. Vous pouvez les regarder un à un, ils vous intéresseront tous: ils vivent, ils pensent et ils agissent.’ Gautier, 1861, 375.

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to. The life-size presentation and bright colours of the uniforms further made Pils’ painting a crowd-puller, eclipsing the static black-and-white figures of photography and Vernet’s La Smala, which had caused a sensation at the Salon of 1845 because of the figures’ liveliness. The notion of Pils’ figures coming to life was satirised in one of Cham’s caricatures, in which a Salon visitor asks her husband if she could invite the group of turcos wading towards the viewer in the centre of the canvas for dinner.330 While contemporaries felt harassed by the Russian figure threatening to enter the viewer’s space in Yvon’s Prise, a similar realistic rendering applied to handsome French soldiers in colourful uniforms led this woman to imagine inviting them to enter the real world. Critics welcomed this as the ‘right’ kind of realism, praising Pils for being a ‘realist, but a realist in the true, the right, sense’.331 Pils’ intensified suggestion of reality differed from that of Yvon’s Prise partly because by 1861 the subject had lost its political explosiveness. Not exposed to the same political urgency as Yvon in terms of subject and time elapsed, Pils could shift the focus to Bosquet’s close bond with the mass of soldiers, creating a less hierarchical image.332 The French soldiers are united with the high-ranking Bosquet in the lower half of the painting. To place the soldiers near the lower margin also brought the troops closer to the Salon visitor, a notion taken up in another caricature by Galetti in which the turco depicted in the painting as fetching water from the river is stretching out his hand to a female Salon visitor (Fig. 51). The meticulous execution is not exploited to render the horrors of the war more credible but to imbue each soldier with importance and give equal emphasis to each soldier’s contribution to the war’s successful outcome. The result is a mundane account of the Battle of the Alma, which Jules Claretie compared in 1882 to Stendhal’s detailed description of the Battle of Waterloo recounted through an inexperienced youth in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839).333 Pils unites the general and his soldiers in lively movements in the lower half of the painting, bringing them closer to the civilian world and humanising them. While Yvon’s painting was already 330

331 332 333

The caption of the caricature reads: ‘Painting by M. Pils / My friend, I beg you, let’s invite one of these Turcos over to our house to have dinner with us! / But my dear, this is a painting by M. Pils! / Come on! I can see that they are alive!’ (‘Tableau de M. Pils / Mon ami, je t’en prie, emmenons un de ces turcos diner à la maison avec nous! / Mais ma chère, c’est de la peinture de M. Pils! / Allons donc! je vois bien qu’ils sont vivants!’) Cham au Salon de 1861 (Paris, 1861). Louis Auvray, Exposition des beaux-arts: Salon de 1861 (Paris: Bureaux de la Revue Artistique, 1861), 21. In fact, Laurent-Pichat even shrugged off Pils’ painting: ‘The subject is maybe already a bit old.’ (Le sujet est peut-être un peu vieux déjà.) Laurent-Pichat, 1861, 3. Jules Claretie, Peintres et sculpteurs: Artistes décédés de 1870 à 1880, Première série (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1882), 147. In War and Peace (first published in 1865–1869), too, Tolstoy presents the accounts of the Napoleonic battles through Nikolai Rostow’s experiences, following Stendhal’s device of recounting these grand historical events from a common soldier’s perspective. See Tolstoy, 2007.

General Bosquet’s ‘mouvement tournant’ in Pils’ 1861 Bataille de l’Alma

Fig. 51:  Galletti, Salon de 1861: Album caricatural (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, A. Bourdilliat et Cie., 1861).

discussed as a document of past military glories, Pils’ soldiers were rooted in the present, becoming an image of the French nation.334 At the Salon of 1861, Pils’ painting hung opposite Yvon’s La bataille de Solférino (Pl. 28), recently fought by French troops. Contemporary accounts suggest that this hanging arrangement and the lifelike soldiers in both paintings must have been overwhelming for visitors entering this main exhibition room, who found themselves surrounded by the blue and red of the uniforms. Considering that the Parisian public continued to be intrigued by the exotic zouave regiment, devouring Paul de Molènes’ novels on zouaves, this effect might have been calculated by a government in need of restoring its damaged military reputation.335 Their later reproduction as postcards underlines this ideological purpose.336 Hornstein discusses the suitability of Yvon’s Prise de la Tour de Malakoff in terms of its reproducibility, concluding: ‘Yvon […] had internalised the idea that representations of war, and especially battle paintings, were, by definition, visual objects produced to be re­­pro­duc­ed.’337 Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma was a success in every respect, having convinced the critics who accepted it as a history painting as well as the Salon crowds who appreciated it for its entertainment value and who were therefore open to this celebration of the common soldier and, by extension, the government. Pils finally found a visual language to express the common soldiers’

334 335 336 337

On Pils’ painting as standing for the French nation see Fouquières, 1876, 30. On the possibly propagandistic rationales of Paul de Molènes’ novels, see Keller, 2010, 31. Postcard of Isidore Pils, Bataille de l’Alma, n. d., Louvre documentation, Paris; postcard of Adolphe Yvon, Prise de la tour de Malakoff, n. d., Louvre documentation, Paris. Hornstein, 2010, 317.

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unrecognised deeds at the Battle of the Alma and was awarded the Médaille d’honneur by the government.338 Probably by the end of the 1860s but proven for 1881, Pils’ painting of the Battle of the Alma was installed in the Salle de Crimée, where it would have created a visual counterweight to Yvon’s trio.339 With its large dimensions it was probably designated for the long wall opposite Yvon’s trio, where it would have joined Protais’ commemoration of soldiers being hit by Russian artillery fire. With Pils’ depiction of soldiers struggling to cross a river in place, this wall would have been about the human cost of war – and thus formed a contrast to the triumphantly posing soldiers in Yvon’s trio. In 1860, the visitors to Versailles would have seen (most of ) the Crimean paintings united for the first time. In contrast to the nearby Salle de Constantine where the paintings and architecture formed orchestrated ensembles, the Salle de Crimée did not function as an artistic whole. In the Salle de Crimée, entertainment and documentation were more important than artistic coherence. As Mercey had outlined in his 1856 letter, which first articulated the idea for the room, the paintings’ main purpose was to tell a story. Similar to the panorama rotundas on the Champs-Elysées, the Salle de Crimée sought to foster a more engaged spectatorship than did the July Monarchy rooms:340 the busts of generals were in the viewer’s space, a Russian figure apparently falling from Yvon’s canvas towards him, and Durand-Brager’s twenty-one paintings of the battlefield surrounded him from three sides of the room. However, the Salle de Crimée does not show one event like a panorama but is rather, in a metaphorical sense, a panorama of the whole war. In a clockwise hang, it follows the events over two years – from the landing in the Crimea to the final victory, depicted in Yvon’s trio, which would have immediately captured the attention of visitors entering the room.341 Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there are no surviving contemporary accounts by visitors to the Salle de Crimée, which may have never existed as a room exclusively dedicated to the Crimean War. Only the above-mentioned postcard of the room (Fig. 25), which probably dates from the end of the nineteenth century, conveys a general impression. In it, Pils’ enormous Bataille de l’Alma is visible at the far end, relegated to the short north wall, where its rims almost touch the adjacent walls. At the left, on the wall facing the Malakoff trio, one can just discern, in extreme perspective distortion, 338 339 340

341

Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1863, 1863, xiii. Ris, 1881, 37. It still hung in the Salle de Crimée in 1896; see Pératé and Nolhac, 1896, 375. It is important to note that Louis-Philippe had also envisaged to foster a more engaged spectatorship in the Salle de Maroc. A painting was supposed to cover one entire wall, and painted columns in the foreground of the painting were meant to blend with the columns of a real balcony railing to create a gradual transition from the painting to the actual room. See Marrinan, 1997, 291. Although, according to the chronology of depicted events, Yvon’s trio was meant to be looked at last.

Outside the Salle de Crimée: Pils’ Tranchée devant Sébastopol (1855)

the contours of the composition of Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino with the vague silhouette of Napoleon III on horseback with his outstretched arm, which represented the Italian Campaign of 1859 and which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Although the room was consequently not dedicated solely to the Crimean War any longer by the time the photo was taken, it nevertheless gives us an idea of how overwhelming the large formats of Yvon’s and Pils’ paintings must have seemed to a contemporary visitor. This effect was heightened by the fact that the top of the canvases tilted forward, further dwarfing the viewer. The impression not only of the individual canvases but also of the ensemble of paintings in different formats, styles, genres, and subjects must have been one of visual overload, heightened by the marble busts placed at eye level in the space before the canvases. It becomes clear that the commissions for the Salle de Crimée were indeed designed more than anything else to impress and overwhelm the visitor, and thereby foreclose expressions of doubt about the conduct of the war. The pictorial strategies developed for the paintings of the Salle de Crimée were inextricably linked to the commissioners’ wishes and geared towards the viewing context of Versailles. This becomes evident in contrast to the composition of Tranchée devant Sébastopol (Universal Exhibition of 1855), painted by Pils probably on his own initiative and examined in the next section.

Outside the Salle de Crimée: Pils’ portrayal of the soldiers’ sufferings in Tranchée devant Sébastopol (1855) Isidore Pils’ Tranchée devant Sébastopol was part of the Crimean War project but subverts the notion of heroism conveyed in the works examined so far in this chapter (Pl. 27). As it presents a different solution to representing war, the painting will be discussed now, at the end of the chapter, although it was exhibited in 1855 and was therefore executed before most of the paintings discussed thus far.342 Free of any explicit commissioners’ demands to glorify the war, Pils uniquely commemorated the soldiers’ sufferings during the long siege of Sevastopol. His painting of a trench was one of the first to acknowledge inactivity and psychological strain as the defining features of the war. By drastically shifting the viewpoint to a lowered level, Pils found a visual language that captured the essence of the Anglo-French siege of the Russian town of Sevastopol. The siege lasted eleven and a half months and has been called the ‘precursor of the industrialised trench warfare of 1914–18’.343 I will argue that Pils, who had followed the French troops to the Crimea, not only expressed the modernity of the warfare by choosing the subject of a trench rather than one of the few battles, but also revolutionised the genre of military painting in terms of form by incorporating features of press images. Pils’ 342 343

The painting was acquired by the Société des Amis des Arts de Bordeaux in 1857. See painting file Bx E 477, Musée des beaux-arts de Bordeaux. Figes, 2010, xx.

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Fig. 52:  Auguste-Denis Raffet, Soldats dans une fortification, lors du siège de Rome, 1850, pen and brown ink, 20.5 × 29.6 cm, Inv. RF 2881, Département des Arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

unadorned style, the blurring of genre boundaries and the changed concepts of the hero combined to produce a visual language capable of portraying the psychological effects of the war. The most obvious innovation of Pils’ painting is the viewpoint, which is at the level of the soldiers. Pils placed the spectator in the trench, which has been dug out by the allied troops. The trench wall blocks our view and confines the pictorial space to a small, illuminated patch. It divides the picture plane horizontally; the upper part of the canvas depicts a sky partly filled with brown smoke. Props such as wicker baskets used to protect the trench diggers cover the ground, and a puddle of dirty water ref lects the wintry sky. The French soldiers are not engaging with the spectator. Most of them turn their backs, sleep in hunched poses, are on watch or are talking to one another. The two soldiers still most likely to be involved in military action are in the centre; they look through a peephole in the trench wall and one can imagine them discussing the current military situation, although they, too, do not level their rif les. A group of three soldiers on the earth f loor dominates the right margin. Of this group, the face and hunched pose of the soldier closest to the centre reveal exhaustion. Pointed hoods cover the faces of the other men lying on the ground and suggest that they are sleeping. Behind this group, the soldier on the far right is leaning against the trench wall, one leg on a wicker basket and his right hand leisurely resting on his rif le, while he, too, gazes through a hole towards their target: Sevastopol. Pils’ decision not to depict the besieged town constitutes a break with the traditional manner of representing sieges in the history of art. Since the seventeenth century,

Outside the Salle de Crimée: Pils’ Tranchée devant Sébastopol (1855)

Fig. 53:  ‘Francs-tireurs au siège de Sébastopol’, press image reproduced in: Victor Duruy, Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France, vol. 3 (Paris: Hachette, 1865), 122.

artists had used the similar visual formula of showing the trench against the backdrop of the besieged city. Even two decades previously, Vernet was still using the same juxtaposed composition when he represented the siege of the town of Constantine for Versailles (Salon of 1839; Fig. 44). This way of representing sieges was first replaced by journalistic images, which used more intimate compositions to convey the sieges from the soldiers’ perspective. For example, an 1850 drawing that Auguste-Denis Raffet executed to be published in an 1854 album of the Siege of Rome (Fig. 52) depicts the soldiers and the trench walls, but not Rome itself. But the real watershed in the visualisation of trench warfare was the Crimean War.344 The French public was unprecedentedly well informed about the events in the theatre of war thanks to novel forms of communication such as the telegraph.345 For the first time in history, photographers were present. Roger Fenton and Charles Langlois took photographs from within the trenches, and artists/journalists, who were often sitting in the trenches during the soldiers’ shifts, as what we would today call embedded journalists, sketched trench scenes peopled with soldiers (Fig. 32, Fig. 53). The sketches they sent back to France were then reproduced as prints in magazines and newspapers and were thus widely disseminated.

344 345

For details on the album, see Napoléon III et l’Italie: Naissance d’une Nation. 1848–1870, exh. cat., Musée de l’Armée, Paris (Paris: Éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2011), 309. Figes, 2010, 147.

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Fig. 54:  Alphonse de Neuville, Chasseurs à pied de la garde impériale à la tranchée; siège de Sébastopol, 1861, oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm, Musée de l’Armée, Paris.

L’Illustration in particular published numerous depictions of trenches with soldiers. One could argue that Pils’ painting also evokes the embedded journalist’s viewpoint. The shade in the empty foreground renders the spectator a voyeur rather than a participant, emphasising the journalistic viewpoint. Théophile Gautier was one of the first art critics to note the crucial inf luence of the unprecedented war coverage on military painting, to which he dedicated an entire chapter in his 1861 publication Abécédaire du Salon de 1861. He wrote: ‘Battle painting is […] a special and modern art form. Without a doubt, battles were painted in past times, but the artists were not compelled to a historical and military fidelity that, moreover, no one was asking for but which is quite reasonably demanded today as the facts are known to everyone.’346 Gautier raises two aspects that are important for an understanding of Pils’ painting: the ever-expanding knowledge of the public looking at military paintings, and the consequent increase in demand for historical accuracy.

346

‘La peinture de bataille est […] un art particulier et tout moderne. Sans doute, on a peint autrefois des batailles, mais les artistes ne s’astreignaient pas à une fidélité historique et militaire que personne, d’ailleurs, ne leur demandait, et qu’on exige aujourd’hui assez raisonnablement, puisque les faits sont connus de tout le monde.’ Gautier, 1861, 369–370.

Outside the Salle de Crimée: Pils’ Tranchée devant Sébastopol (1855)

Fig. 55:  ‘Place d’armes du centre de la parallèle avancée de l’attaque du mamelon Vert. - D’après M. Protais’, engraved by J. Worm, in: V. P., ‘Correspondance de Crimée’, L’Illustration 25, no. 642 (16 June 1855), 376.

In fact, the public’s increased knowledge allowed Pils to abandon the traditional way of suggesting historical accuracy in favour of a deeper truth. Instead of presenting historical accuracy by showing an abundance of objects and anecdotes – the ‘facts known to everyone’ – Pils focused on the psychological aspects of trench warfare. This becomes clear when one compares Pils’ work with Alphonse de Neuville’s 1861 trench view (Fig. 54). In de Neuville’s later painting, the higher and more distant viewpoint enables us to see everything: death, military action and leisure activities. Furthermore, the simultaneity renders it more staged. Even Sevastopol is visible in the background. In conveying an image of busy distraction in the trenches, it is similar to images of trench life published in the press at the time (Fig. 55). The bustling activity in de Neuville’s depiction is in stark contrast to Pils’ painting where almost all action or narrative is absent. De Neuville shows soldiers of the prestigious Imperial Guard, while Pils shifts the focus to the lower ranks, illustrating the Siege of Sevastopol through the experiences of simple zouaves. Both the lower military ranks and the lack of military action in the trenches were aspects of the war that the public would have been familiar with from contemporary literature such as Commentaires d’un soldat (1860) by Paul de Molènes, which was widely read and widely publicised at the time. Molènes’ accounts of life in the trenches read like a description of Pils’ painting, emphasising that the soldiers witnessed the war from a worm’s-eye view: ‘They have to stay in the ditch that they have dug, behind the

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gabion that they have lifted on to the soil reddened by their blood, and that for entire months, in a harsh season, under the icy cane of the cold!’347 Molènes’ descriptions give an insight into the dangers facing the soldier’s body and soul: the long wait in the cold with their limbs frozen, often leading to amputations and death.348 Forced into passivity but at the same time exposed to danger, the allied troops were haunted by an omnipresent ‘trench fatigue’, often resulting in madness and suicide, a psychological effect of trench warfare that was only scientifically explored after the First World War. Indeed, the historian Denis Winter wrote in 1978 about the real dangers of trench warfare: ‘Civilians contemplating trench war today would tend to think of it largely in terms of artillery and sniping action, raids and patrols. When the old soldier looks back over the years to his trench duty, however, he remembers clearly how seldom these actions interrupted the prolonged inactivity. To him, the real enemy was the weather and the side effects of living rough.’349 Pils’ painting is precisely about these side effects which imposed the greatest strain on the serving soldiers: the subdued and dirty colours of the palette, which dominate the whole picture plane, are emblematic of the mud that surrounded the men. The puddle suggests the damp – another threat to the soldiers, and an issue also addressed in the contemporary press; an engraving published at the time of the siege depicts soldiers cowering in a trench filled with water (Fig. 56). What Pils’ passive soldiers convey most convincingly is the unbearable inactivity, described by Winter as resulting in the ‘last force (after the cold and wet, the vermin and the disease) to bludgeon a front-line soldier […]. (The) mental depression and physical sluggishness […] came from the lack of sleep combined with a total lack of information, which added to the lack of a sense of purpose.’350 The author’s emphasis on time as one of the major threats is also evoked in Pils’ painting. By not showing the source of danger, Pils creates suspense. The cannonball depicted in the foreground as the only trace of the enemy takes on a symbolic rather than an illustrative role. From images in the press showing how French trenches could suddenly be attacked by the Russians, the audience looking at the painting would have known such an apparently tranquil scene was in fact full of suspense. This suspense, which is suppressed in Pils’ painting, explodes into unmitigated terror in Tolstoy’s account of the invisible enemy in the Crimean trenches. Tolstoy himself witnessed the war as a soldier and described trench warfare in his so-called ‘sketches’, for immediate publication in the Russian magazine The Contemporary; these pieces, later published as

347

348 349 350

‘Il faut qu’ils restent attachés dans le fossé qu’ils ont creusé, derrière le gabion qu’ils ont élevé à une terre rougie de leur sang, et cela pendant des mois entiers, dans une saison inclémente, sous la verge glacée du froid!’ Molènes, 1860, 123. Duruy, 1865, vol. 3, 159. Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 95. Winter, 1978, 100.

Outside the Salle de Crimée: Pils’ Tranchée devant Sébastopol (1855)

Fig. 56:  ‘Les tranchées les jours de pluie’, press image reproduced in: Victor Duruy, Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France, vol. 3 (Paris: Hachette, 1865), 157.

a book, The Sebastopol Sketches (1855), were to give Tolstoy the reputation of being one of the first modern war journalists.351 He evokes the sounds in the trenches as an inferno: You will hear this whistling sound come nearer in an accelerating crescendo, and then you will see a black sphere and witness the shell’s impact against the earth, its palpable, ringing explosion. Then shell splinters will f ly whistling and whining in all directions, stones will rustle through the air, and you will be spattered with mud […]. You will discover a peculiar fascination in this dangerous game of life and death.352 Compared to Tolstoy’s kinaesthesia, Pils’ scene seems static. The ‘feeling of suppressed terror’ that Tolstoy mentions in passing is more evident in Pils’ apparently calm scene where the terror is concealed. Psychological truthfulness aside, it is hard to imagine how Pils’ victimised and passive soldiers served the propagandistic display of the Universal Exhibition at a time when support for the Crimean War had reached a low point among the French public. One might argue that, because the besieged city is not even visible in the painting, the soldiers’ endurance is reduced to absurdity. In regard to the history of art, the soldiers surely do not fulfil the norms of the exemplum virtutis. The French élan with which the zouaves attack the enemy in the contemporary battle paintings of this war is absent; 351 352

Leo Tolstoy, The Sebastopol Sketches, first published in Russian 1855 (London: Penguin Books, 1986). Tolstoy, 1986, 55.

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instead, the soldiers here conduct themselves with what Molènes in 1860 described as a ‘resigned obedience to the invincible law of necessity and time’.353 They correspond to the soldiers described by Tolstoy in War and Peace (1865–1869), who are marionettes of the ‘unknown and unknowable forces of war’.354 This leads to the question of whether the depicted soldiers were widely understood as marionettes, and by extension, victims of the French government, which had sent them into the trenches. It is important to note here, however, that contemporaries understood obliviousness towards danger as being equally heroic as proactive fighting. Pils’ emaciated soldiers should not be understood simply as victims of fate. Rather, they should be interpreted along the lines of Clausewitz’s war theories, familiar to the French public during the time of the Crimean War.355 Clausewitz defined the form of bravery that stems from a calm, ref lective attitude as superior to brawn.356 Pils’ painting seems to inhabit a space between Tolstoy’s notion of war as fate-controlled and Clausewitz’s ideal of proactively inf luencing fate.357 Pils’ emphasis on the soldiers’ patience, in the context of contemporary war theories, highlights the idea that they are stoically holding the fort. This calm, ref lective attitude is emphasised in Molènes’ accounts. He proudly recounted how the dangerous roar of the incessant hail of shells came to represent for him and his soldiers the harmless sound of the sea crashing against the shore.358 Tolstoy similarly described the numbing effects of the sound of war when he said: ‘So now you have seen the defenders of Sevastopol on the lines of defence themselves, […] and you retrace your steps, for some reason paying no attention now to the cannonballs and bullets that continue to whistle across your route.’359 The soldiers’ inattention to danger fascinated contemporaries. Indeed, one art critic was impressed that, in de Neuville’s,

353 354 355

356

357 358

359

‘obéissance résignée aux lois invincibles de la nécessité et du temps’, Molènes, 1860, 122–123. Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1996), 33. Ed. de la Barre Duparcq, a French professor at the military school at Saint-Cyr, reviewed Clausewitz’s theories in 1853. See Ed. de la Barre Duparcq, Commentaires sur le traité de la guerre de Clausewitz (Paris: Librairie militaire, maritime et polytechnique, 1853). Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, ed. Ernesto Grassi, first published 1832 (Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009), 87–90. Ed. de la Barre Duparq also insisted on the form of courage, which stems from an ‘énergie morale’, as ‘le courage le plus durable, le plus constant’; see Duparcq, 1853, 319. Introduction by Anatol Rapoport to Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 16, cited in Pick, 1996, 33. ‘The cannon sound has become for us a sound similar to that of the sea crashing onto the shores.’ (Le bruit du canon était devenu pour nous un bruit semblable à celui de la mer pour qui en habite les rives.) Molènes, 1860, 120. Molènes further wrote: ‘To recount one of our days, is recounting all of them.’ (Raconter une de nos journées, c’est les raconter toutes.) Molènes, 1860, 120. Tolstoy, 1986, 56.

Outside the Salle de Crimée: Pils’ Tranchée devant Sébastopol (1855)

as in Pils’ painting, ‘the danger is not a concern’.360 Théophile Gautier attested that, looking at Pils’ painting, one had faith in the Crimean troops and perceived the passive soldiers as brave; he praised the successful depiction of the soldiers’ courage, saying: ‘One likes, one commiserates with these brave soldiers as much as one admires them because M. Pils has shown them with a human aspect.’361 Pils’ representation of the suffering soldier was thus in line with how Napoleon III communicated the failure of the allied troops to the public. At the time the painting was on display, the press repeatedly published calls for donations for the troops in the Crimea.362 Pils’ painting and the accusatory tone of the press aimed at those who had not yet donated might have jointly appealed to the spectators’ guilty conscience.363 Being anonymous, Pils’ soldiers invite the viewer’s munificent empathy.364 The artist stripped the soldiers of any distinguishing features such as physiognomic details. This lack of individuality arguably allowed the soldiers to function as a projection for the feelings of the viewers, whose relatives or friends were also in the trenches. By inviting common experience, Pils’ painting conjured the ideal of the common people as actors of the war and hence catered to one of the staples of Napoleon III’s populist politics. In art-historical terms, Pils’ work conf lates artistic genres. Adopting the large format usually reserved for history painting, it depicts both everyday life and a war situation. This was not entirely new, as genre painting had already invaded history painting during the First Empire, with, for example, specific accessories such as uniforms and defined places. Later, Vernet integrated subplots into the grand narrative of battle. Furthermore, scenes of camp life provided a common theme, depicting soldiers relaxing before or after battle.365 But, with Pils’ painting, the idiom of genre invaded military painting more directly. The boundaries are more literally blurred; a scene of 360 361

362 363

364 365

‘le danger n’est pas une préoccupation’, Olivier Merson, Exposition de 1861: La Peinture en France (Paris: E. Dentu, Librairie de la Société des Gens de lettres, 1861), 73. ‘On aime, on plaint ces braves soldats autant qu’on les admire, car M. Pils les a montrés sous un aspect humain,’ Théophile Gautier, Les beaux-arts en Europe, 1855, vol. 2 (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1856), 24. For example Paulin, ‘Souscription pour les soldats et marins en Crimée’, L’Illustration 25, no. 621 (20  January 1855), 48. ‘We will continue to register everything that comes to our attention of public testimony of sympathy for our soldiers in the Crimea. We also have to investigate the motives of the little willingness of some parts of France and some persons for whom a simple petition is not enough to encourage diligence.’ (Nous continuerons à enregistrer tout ce qui viendra à notre connaissance des témoignages publics de sympathie pour nos soldats de Crimée. Nous aurons également à rechercher le motif du peu d’empressement de quelques parties de la France et de quelques personnes dont une simple mise en demeure ne suffit pas à chauffer le zèle.) Paulin, 20 January 1855, 48. See for example Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 24; and later Julius Meyer, Geschichte der modernen französischen Malerei seit 1789 (Leipzig, 1867), 648. On genre invading history painting during the First Empire, see Prendergast, 1997, 150.

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what is clearly a contemporary military engagement is simultaneously a genre depiction of soldiers doing nothing. Gautier attested to its novelty, writing that it was painted ‘in a style completely different from what one is used to seeing. The zouaves […] have withdrawn and melancholic physiognomies, simple demeanours where one can read the boredom and exhaustion of a long shift.’366 To conclude this chapter on the representation of the Crimean War, under the pressure of public opinion that was still f luctuating between resentment at the young Empire’s failure to keep its initial peace promises and acceptance of the semi-successful outcome of the war that had restored France’s glory, artists developed pictorial strategies that were concerned with pictorially authenticating their image of the war. The classic depiction of military action with the high command in the foreground and the battle in the background as in Vernet’s Bataille de l’Alma (1857; Pl. 4) seemed unconvincing. Formal innovations of battle paintings were inevitable, as it was challenged by the commissioners’ post-war politics, the sensationalism and avidity for spectacle of the newly developing Parisian mass culture, public opinion on the Crimean War, and the new visuals of war reportage. In the Salle de Crimée, the spectrum of styles ranging from painterly to crisply ‘realist’, of viewpoints plunging the viewer into the action or distancing him with a bird’s-eye view, genres that reached from portraiture to religious paintings, and functions such as decorative, engaging, or informative all came together to surround the nineteenth-century viewer on all four sides. The effect of the accumulation of ‘facts’ in Vernet’s La Smala that had acted to convince the viewers in 1845 and 1855 of the accuracy of the representation now left the canvases and was scattered over a whole room. That Yvon, Protais, Bellangé, Appert and Doré – to name only a few – had been working for a site-specific context becomes clear in comparison with Pils’ Tranchée devant Sébastopol, which had not been commissioned for this room. The soldiers’ passivity and lack of narrative would be impossible to imagine in the context of the Salle de Crimée, where it would have a disrupting effect and halt the narrative that the representations of heroic actions established. These heroic actions were most successfully conveyed in the innovatively engaging compositions of the grandes machines of the Battle of the Alma by Pils and La Prise de la tour de Malakoff by Yvon, which managed to affect the Salon visitors in this particular historical moment.

366

‘dans un style tout différent de ce qu’on est habitué à voir. Les zouaves […] ont des physionomies fermes et mélancoliques, des attitudes simples où se laissent lire l’ennui et la fatigue d’une longe faction.’ Gautier, 1856, vol. 2, 23.

IV Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino (1861) and the Decline of the Spectacular Mode

Historical background of the Campaign of Italy (1859) Only three years after the end of the Crimean War, France’s army was mobilised again. The Campaign of Italy began on 29 April 1859 and saw France fighting as an ally of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia against Austrian rule in Italy.1 In just three months, the Austrians were comprehensively defeated by the Piedmontese and 130,000 French soldiers under the general command of Napoleon III, albeit at a terrible cost of French lives. Although this victory did not seal Italy’s unification and did not lead to any major territorial gains for the allies, Austria was weakened and France’s main aim therefore fulfilled. At the Peace Conference of Villafranca in July 1859, Austria ceded Lombardy and its capital, Milan, to the House of Savoy, and the rulers of central Italy were restored. For the genre of military painting, the conf lict signalled a watershed. Though during the Crimean War most of the visual media such as photography, the stéréoscopie and illustrated magazines were available, they were not fully exploited for the representation of war until the Italian Campaign.2 No similarly beneficial use was made, however, of the availability of technically advanced rif les, the incoherent strategies instead relying on the advance of French infantry. In addition, the French army was not this time led by an experienced general who had seen active service but, as Jeremy Black 1

2

Also known as the Second War of Italian Independence, Franco-Austrian War, AustroSardinian War or Austro-Piedmontese War. I will subsequently use the term Italian Campaign as it corresponds most closely to the French denomination of Campagne d’Italie mainly used in nineteenth-century France. In France today, it is known as ‘Guerre d’Italie’; see Gilles Pécout, ‘L’unité des Italiens de 1849 à 1870: Une histoire française?’, in Napoléon III et l’Italie: Naissance d’une Nation. 1848–1870, exh. cat., Musée de l’Armée, Paris (Paris: Éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2011), 38. For an account of why the available technologies were not exploited by French journalists during the Crimean War in the face of press censorship, see Ulrich Keller, ‘Schlachtenbilder, Bilderschlachten – Zur visuellen Kultur des Krimkrieges’, in Der Krimkrieg als erster europäischer Medienkrieg: Kultur und Technik, eds. Georg Maag and Wolfram Pyta, vol. 14 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010), 26–29, 38–40.

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Fig. 57:  Napoleon III, Tracé autographe de SM l’Empereur indiquant le point le plus favorable pour faire la photographie de Solferino, 1859, pen on paper, 21.3 × 32.1 cm, Bibliothèque de Rouen.

notes, ‘suffered from the poor military leadership of Napoleon III, who did not match his famous namesake in strategic or tactical skill’.3 The three paintings that form the focus of this chapter each present different solutions to negotiating this tension between antiquated and modern aspects of war. Yvon’s painting of the Battle of Solferino (Salon of 1861; Pl. 28) centre-stages the emperor and, by its formal references to First Empire paintings, seeks to align him with the military grandeur of his uncle, while his painting of the Battle of Magenta (Salon of 1863; Fig. 74) conveys the heroic struggle of the deathly ‘cult of the bayonet’. Finally, Meissonier’s painting of the Battle of Solferino (Salon of 1864; Pl. 29) eliminates the battle and the enemy entirely to show the distant high command, statically masterminding the modern battle from afar. The problems with which military painters were confronted were rooted in the nature of warfare in 1859, and it is therefore useful to consider the historical background of the Italian Campaign. For the first time in a military conf lict, photographers followed the army, some employed directly by the army, others by publishers or as freelancers.4 The photographer Léon-Eugène Méhédin (1828–1905) was commissioned directly by Napoleon III to continue with a series documenting the emperor’s reign.5 The photographer – his 3 4

5

Jeremy Black, Western Warfare, 1775–1882 (Chesham: Acumen, 2001), 128. The most famous names, apart from Méhédin, discussed below, include Eugène Disdéri and Nadar. See Anthony Petiteau, ‘1859: La guerre d’Italie photographiée’, in Napoléon III et l’Italie: Naissance d’une Nation. 1848–1870, exh. cat., Musée de l’Armée, Paris (Paris: Éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2011), 132. Petiteau, 2011, 132.

Historical background of the Campaign of Italy (1859)

Fig. 58: Jules Couppier, Cimetière de Melegnano, le lendemain de la bataille, 1859, stereoscopic print on albumen paper, 6.9 × 13.6 cm, Musée de l’Armée, Paris.

official title was ‘photographe de l’état-major de l’Empereur et le charge de photographier les hauts lieux de la campagne d’Italie’ – lodged with the high command and had privileged access to the battle sites. Napoleon III’s inf luence on Méhédin’s picturesque views of the battlefields was so direct that even a drawing by the emperor’s own hand survives that determines the angle from which Méhédin was to photograph the Tower of Solferino, the landmark of the war’s most important battle (Fig. 57).6 The other side of the coin was represented by the advent of war reportage that no longer shied away from the dead, as had been the case during the Crimean War.7 On the contrary, the invention of the stéréoscopie, introduced at the London Universal Exhibition of 1851, enhanced the immediacy with which the French public would view these gruesome images.8 The viewer looked through glasses that combined two separate but congruent images. The combination of the images then created the perception of 3-D depth. Jules Couppier, for example, showed piles of dead soldiers as a stéréoscopie (Fig. 58).9 In general, Napoleon  III supported the rapid dissemination of photographs, also utilising 6

7 8

9

On Napoleon III’s influence on the official photographs, see Monica Maffioli, ‘Photographie et Risorgimento: 1840–1870’, in Napoléon III et l’Italie: Naissance d’une Nation. 1848– 1870, exh. cat., Musée de l’Armée, Paris (Paris: Éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2011), 83. Petiteau, 2011, 137. Petiteau, 2011, 139. The Maison Gaudin published the stéréoscopies in two series: Théâtre de la guerre and Armée d’Italie. Ferrier & Soulier published stéréoscopies in one series: Guerre d’Italie; see Maffioli, 2011, 82. On this work see Napoléon III et l’Italie: Naissance d’une Nation. 1848–1870, exh. cat., Musée de l’Armée, Paris (Paris: Éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2011), 240, cat. 135.

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IV  Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino (1861) and the Decline of the Spectacular Mode

Fig. 59:  Marie-Alexandre Alophe, Groupe de zouaves victorieux à Solférino. Mise en scène, lors ou après la campagne d’Italie de 1859, photograph, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

journals, such as La Lumière. Photographs were more commercialised during the Italian Campaign than during the Crimean War, and their prices had plunged.10 As French public opinion played such a formative role in Napoleon III’s decision-making, it is not surprising that many photographs were staged, some of them in Parisian studios, such as, for example, Marie-Alexandre Alophe’s (1812–1883) photograph of victorious zouaves supposedly at Solferino (Fig. 59).11 Public interest in the conf lict was so great that it led to the creation of new journals such as La Guerre d’Italie: Récit hebdomadaire illustré and Journal de la guerre, which were published once or twice a week, depending on events.12 Photographers did not replace artists, however. Many journals such as L’Illustration continued to send artists to the battlefield, as during the Crimean War, to execute sketches.13 In addition, as well as Jung and Gaspard Gobaut (1814–1882), who were again dispatched by the Dépôt de la Guerre, at least six known battle painters followed the French troops to the battlefield: 10 11 12 13

Petiteau, 2011, 139. On this work see Napoléon III et l’Italie, exh. cat., 2011, 239, cat. 134. La Guerre d’Italie: Récit hebdomadaire illustré, nos. 1–26 (4 June–10 September 1859); Journal de la guerre: Bulletin de l’armée, nos. 1–20 (May–July 1859). Meissonier spent time with Giacomelli, the on-the-scene illustrator for L’Illustration; see Constance Cain Hungerford, ‘Ernest Meissonier’s First Military Paintings: I: The Emperor Napoleon III at the Battle of Solferino’, Arts Magazine 54, no. 5 ( January 1980), 89–97, 92, footnote 37.

Historical background of the Campaign of Italy (1859)

Protais, Beaucé, Durand-Brager, Édouard Armand-Dumaresq (1826–1895), Yvon and Meissonier.14 The Journal de la guerre was excited to announce the departure of Vernet: M. Horace Vernet has just left for Italy; he has been commissioned to paint a picture of the Battle of Montebello for the Musée de Versailles. He is visiting the site of the battle to draw the admirable landscape in the middle of which he will group the diverse incidents of this heroic struggle.15 Although no pictorial proof of Vernet’s presence in Italy appears to have survived, a large number of military paintings by other artists have. As was the case after the Crimean War, these were mainly commissioned for Versailles. The battle painters profited from photography too, and Yvon took several photographs of the terrain of the battlefields.16 Altogether, the French artists’ contribution to the creation of a distinctly French iconography of the Risorgimento cannot be overestimated.17 In sending soldiers to Italy, Napoleon III was following in the footsteps of his uncle Napoleon I, who had invaded the Papal States and northern Italy in 1796. After the Italian campaign of 1800, Napoleon created his ‘Kingdom of Italy’ in 1805.18 Ever since Napoleon’s defeat and the proclamation of Austria as protector of Italy in 1815, France had been attempting to win back her former continental hegemony.19 From 1848 until 1870 the government of Louis-Napoleon found itself intervening in Italy, siding with seemingly different political camps in what was called at that time the ‘Roman question’. When Piedmont went to war with Austria for the first time, in the First Italian War of Independence of 1848, the French government made it clear that it agreed with Piedmont without actually intervening on its behalf. Instead, in 1849 Louis-Napoleon increased French inf luence by sending an expeditionary army to restore the pope in Rome and suppress the Roman Republic, which had been established by Giuseppe Mazzini and his followers while Austria was distracted by the Piedmontese in the north. The French military presence culminated in the earlier mentioned Siege of Rome, which lasted one month until 30 June and ended when Giuseppe 14 15

16 17 18 19

Petiteau, 2011, 131. ‘M. Horace Vernet vient de partir pour l’Italie; il a été chargé de peindre pour le musée de Versailles le tableau de la bataille de Montebello. Il se rend sur le lieu du combat pour dessiner l’admirable paysage au milieu duquel il groupera divers incidents de cette lutte héroïque,’ Journal de la guerre (8 June 1859), cited in Petiteau, 2011, 140, footnote 12. See for example, Adolphe Yvon, Tour de Solférino, c. 1859, photograph, inv. RF 42520.19, Département des Arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Petiteau, 2011, 131. Alexander Grab, ‘From the French Revolution to Napoleon’, in Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796–1900, ed. John A. Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35. The first opportunity for French intervention came in 1831 when France stationed a garrison in Ancona; see John A. Davis, ‘Introduction’, in Italy in the Nineteenth Century 1796– 1900, ed. John A. Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.

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Garibaldi, who had come with his men to the defence of the Roman Republic, retreated from Rome to the Apennine Mountains and the papacy was formally restored.20 For Louis-Napoleon, the restoration of the papacy was a unique chance to diminish Austrian influence in Italy, the Austrians usually considering themselves responsible for protecting the pope. Furthermore, Louis-Napoleon’s young presidency was based on Catholic support, which the rescue of the pope helped to maintain.21 While the Siege of Rome was not a gesture against Piedmont, which was mainly fighting Austria in the north of Italy for expansionist reasons, it represented the relocation of French politics to Italian soil: paradoxically, the French expeditionary force under General Oudinot had to fight against their own countrymen who had voluntarily joined the Italians to help defend the national awakening of Italy. Without any official French support, these 5,000 French, mainly from the working class, were fighting for ideological reasons.22 They were expressing their anger about Louis-Napoleon’s conservative move to suppress the birth of a republic in favour of the pope. When captured as prisoners, the French soldiers of the official expeditionary corps were often sent back to their army with republican tracts citing article V of the Second Republic’s new constitution: ‘(France) respects foreign nationalities, as she expects her own (nationality) to be respected; (France) does not engage in any war in the hope of conquest, and never uses her forces against the freedom of any other people.’23 Naturally, the Siege of Rome provoked passionate political debate within France and, with the long-term presence of French troops in Rome to protect the pope, the ‘Roman question’ continued to occupy the French public until 1870.24 In 1859, Napoleon  III’s objectives in the war were primarily diplomatic. By weakening Austria’s predominance in Italy, the emperor could now continue what he had begun with the Crimean War – and push back another major power of the old order.25 Both Russia and Austria had been effectively undermining France’s inf luence since the beginning of the century. Ideologically, the French support for the Italian cause could be seen as referencing the concept of Europe as a collection of liberal nation states, as envisaged by Napoleon I. The memory of his deeds in Italy was con20 21 22

23

24 25

Davis, 2000, 3. Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 17. Anne-Claire Ignace, ‘Partisans ou adversaires de l’Unité italienne: Les volontaires français dans l’Italie du Risorgimento (1848–1870)’, in Napoléon III et l’Italie: Naissance d’une Nation. 1848–1870, exh. cat., Musée de l’Armée, Paris (Paris: Éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2011). ‘Elle respecte les nationalités étrangères, comme elle entend faire respecter la sienne; n’entreprend aucune guerre dans des vues de conquête, et n’emploie jamais ses forces contre la liberté d’aucun peuple,’ www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr, accessed on 1 February 2017. The French intervention in Italy was the subject of a 2011 exhibition at the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. See Napoléon III et l’Italie, exh. cat., 2011. Figes observes that this was Napoleon III’s main aim when he provoked the Crimean War; see Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Penguin Books, 2010), xxii.

Historical background of the Campaign of Italy (1859)

tinually renewed by publications such as Laurent de l’Ardèche’s Histoire de l’Empereur Napoléon, illustrated by Horace Vernet and published in 1859.26 The constitutional monarchy of Piedmont, led by King Victor Emmanuel II, was at the outset of the war less interested in national unification than in curtailing Austrian inf luence in the peninsula and expanding its own control.27 Piedmontese Prime Minister Count Cavour was the principal figure to take advantage of the kingdom’s economic and military strengths and independence. He planned for an alternative to republican nationalism and wanted Piedmont to become the leading force in the unification of Italy.28 Piedmont’s participation in the Crimean War had been instrumental in attracting French attention to the kingdom’s cause.29 At the 1856 Congress of Paris, which concluded the Crimean War, Cavour had successfully presented his concept of an independent Italian nation to Napoleon III, who then started to consider an alliance with Piedmont against Austria.30 French public opinion was, however, overwhelmingly against another war so soon, and Napoleon III had to carefully orchestrate hostility against Austria. He would deliberately goad the Austrians into war whilst simultaneously reassuring his own worried subjects that military action was not his intention.31 However, the French public appears to have seen through his manipulations. The French correctly read as signs of war both Napoleon  III’s faux-innocent declaration in January 1859 to the Austrian ambassador, expressing his regret about the worsening relations between their countries, and, in the same month, the marriage of his cousin Prince Napoleon to Victor Em­­ma­ nuel’s daughter, Princess Maria Clotilde, an obvious political alliance of France and Piedmont.32 In order to calm public concern after the wedding, in February 1859 the emperor published under the name of a ghostwriter a pamphlet entitled L’Empereur Napoléon III et l’Italie.33 This emphasised the government’s peaceful intentions while at the same 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

P.-M. Laurent de l’Ardèche, Histoire de l’Empereur Napoleón, illustrée par Horace Vernet (Paris: J.-J. Dubochet et Cie., 1859). Anthony Cardoza, ‘Cavour and Piedmont’, in Italy in the Nineteenth Century 1796–1900, ed. John A. Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 125. Cardoza, 2000, 113. Piedmont’s participation in the Crimean War is often interpreted as having been for the sole purpose of calling attention to the Italian cause. However, Cardoza suggests that both France and England put intense pressure on Piedmont to enter the war largely to reassure Austria and gain her participation in the anti-Russian coalition. Cardoza, 2000, 124. Frédéric Canonge, Histoire militaire contemporaine: 1854–1871, vol.  1 (Paris: Charpentier, 1882), 113. Lynn Marshall Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 51–69. Declaration to the Austrian ambassador at the New Year’s reception in January 1859. The report of the betrothal was published in the Moniteur on 25 January 1859; see Case, 1972, 57. La Guéronnière, L’Empereur Napoléon III et l’Italie (Paris: E. Dentu, Firmin Didot Frères, Fils et Cie., 1859).

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time calling attention to the pressing Italian case: ‘War, which fortunately is unlikely, would have no other aim, should it become necessary, than to prevent revolutions by giving legitimate satisfactions to peoples’ needs and by the protection and guarantee of the recognised principles and authentic rights of their nationalities.’34 Seeking to placate the international community, which was always concerned that Napoleonic expansionism might repeat itself, the emperor added: ‘The emperor Napoleon I believed himself obliged to conquer nations in order to liberate them; if his successor should ever need to defend them, it would be to liberate them without conquering them.’35 Instead of stirring up aggression against the enemy as he had done before the Crimean War by dubbing the Russians barbaric, Napoleon III now emphasised the virtues of the future ally: ‘In history, Italy stands for something even greater than nationality; it stands for civilisation.’36 The pamphlet, however, was perceived as the threat it was intended to be. Despite the emperor’s efforts, most sections of society and all political camps remained hostile to war, with the sole exception of the working class. The Paris banker Jakob de Rothschild supposedly commented after Napoleon III’s New Year provocation: The emperor does not know France. Twenty years ago a war might have been proclaimed without causing any great perturbation. Hardly anybody but the bankers held stock exchange or commercial securities, but today everybody has his railway coupons or his three-per-cents. The emperor was right when he said ‘the Empire meant peace’, but what he does not know is that the Empire is done for if we have war.37 Confronted by an almost unanimous desire for peace at home and Europe’s efforts to calm Austro-Piedmontese relations, Napoleon III had already relinquished the realisation of his war plans when an unexpected ultimatum from Austria in April guaranteed the outbreak of hostilities. The Austrian demand for the complete demobilisation of the Sardinian army was published in the Moniteur on 23 April and resulted in French 34

35

36

37

‘La guerre, qui heureusement n’est pas probable, n’aurait d’autre but, le jour où elle serait nécessaire, que de prévenir les révolutions par des satisfactions légitimes données aux besoins des peuples, et par la protection et la garantie des principes reconnus et des droits authentiques de leur nationalités.’ La Guéronnière, 1859, 23. ‘L’Empereur Napoléon Ier s’est cru obligé de conquérir les nationalités pour les affranchir; si jamais son successeur avait à les défendre, ce serait pour les affranchir sans les conquérir.’ La Guéronnière, 1859, 23. ‘L’Italie représente dans l’histoire quelque chose de plus grand encore que la nationalité, elle représente la civilisation,’ La Guéronnière, 1859, 3; in the official war report, Bazancourt would also call Italy the ‘cradle of civilisation’ (berceau de la civilisation), Baron de Bazancourt, Campagne d’Italie, vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie de Ch. Lahure et Cie., 1859), 4. As reported by Viel Castel and noted in his diary entry of 25 January 1859, Memoirs of Count Horace de Viel Castel, trans. and ed. Charles Bousfield, vol. 2 (London: Remington & co. Publishers, 1888), 143–144.

Historical background of the Campaign of Italy (1859)

opinion shifting towards war.38 Aware of French support, Victor Emmanuel II let the ultimatum pass and the war Napoleon III had hoped for started on 29 April 1859. At the outbreak of the war, the Armée d’Italie, as the French army sent to Italy was named, had yet to be formed and its soldiers withdrawn from Africa and other military bases throughout France. The arrival in Piedmont within only twenty-five days of over 107,000 French soldiers, assembled from France and Algeria, entered the annals of history as it was facilitated by the first large-scale use of railways.39 Napoleon III took over the high command himself and was bade farewell by an enthusiastic Paris crowd on 10 May.40 His chief of staff was Marshal Vaillant, who had fought under the First Empire in Algeria, commanded the French expeditionary corps in Rome in 1849 and been appointed ministre de la Guerre in 1854. Notably, his military service seems to have qualified him to later hold one of the most powerful positions in the art world: after the Italian Campaign, he would be made ministre des Beaux-Arts and be responsible for the radical reorganisation of the École des Beaux-Arts.41 The army was divided into five corps, led by generals who had all seen active service. The Fifth Corps was commanded by Prince Napoleon or ‘Craint Plomb’ as the French called him after his publicly criticised early departure from the Crimean battlefield.42 As in the Crimean War, the elite forces of the zouaves, turcos and chasseurs would play the decisive role during the Italian Campaign.43 The other participating armies were also led by their country’s sovereigns: the Piedmontese-Sardinian army numbered over 52,000 and 3,000 volunteers and was commanded by King Victor Emmanuel II, while the Austrian Army, numbering over 95,000 men, was commanded by Count Franz Gyulai and later by Emperor Francis Joseph himself.44 In order to avoid arousing international suspicion, Napoleon  III had left the creation of an army to the last moment, resulting in, for example, poor administration and ill-considered medical logistics; however, the Austrians’ disorganised conduct during 38 39

40 41

42 43 44

Case 1972, 68, 70–71. Canonge, 1882, vol. 1, 116; one part of the French army was dispatched to Italy by rail to Toulon and Marseilles, and then by sea to Genoa; another was transported by rail to the French side of the Alps at Saint Jean de Maurienne, and from Susa on the Piedmontese side, Richard Brooks, Solferino 1859: The Battle for Italy’s Freedom (Oxford: Osprey, 2009), 23; the approximate numbers of the French army were: 108,000 men and 318 artillery pieces, Napoléon III et l’Italie, exh. cat., 2011, 117. Case, 1972, 71. On Vaillant’s role as ministre des Beaux-Arts, see Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 15 (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1876), 725. Brooks, 2009, 9. Patrick Marder, ‘The French Campaign of 1859’ (10 December 2005), essay published on www.militaryhistoryonline.com, accessed on 2 June 2016. The estimated numbers of the armies were: 52,528 soldiers from the Piedmontese-Sardinian army and 3,120 volunteers, 90 artillery pieces. Austrian army: 95,883 men and 448 artillery pieces, Napoléon III et l’Italie, exh. cat., 2011, 118–119.

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the campaign compensated for many French shortcomings.45 In general, the French army was more experienced and proactive than the Austrians. Crucially, French officers had a different style of leadership, commanding their troops from the front, whereas the Austrian commanders stayed away from actual engagements; this explains their low casualty rate, a statistic that became notorious.46 But French strategy was antiquated, as has been demonstrated by Patrick Marder’s study of the poor tactical situation of the French army at the outset of the Italian Campaign.47 This situation cannot have been helped by the emperor’s decision to employ a historian, Adolphe Thiers, and an aged veteran of the Grande Armée, Henri Baron de Jomini, as his main advisors for the battle plans. Napoleon III counted on the attacking power of the French army and did not take into account the fact that, unlike during the Crimean War, the French were now facing an adversary armed with rif les.48 He notoriously underestimated the destructive power of these weapons, suggesting in an order to his soldiers that the bayonet and the French élan famous since the First Empire were superior to these new-fangled rif les. Announcing, incredibly, that they were dangerous only at a distance and adjusting his strategy according to this assumption, the emperor was guilty of a misjudgement that was to a large extent responsible for the excessive number of French casualties during this war.49 Due to the French infantry advances, all the battles fought were allied victories. On 4 June the first full-scale battle took place at Magenta, which would form the subject of Yvon’s painting exhibited at the Salon of 1863 (Fig. 74). Marder calls this battle a ‘very disconnected clash’ as neither army had expected or planned the encounter and both Napoleon III and Gyulai were surprised to be confronted by the enemy. Magenta occupied a key position as it lay on the road to Milan, the allies’ provisional goal, and commanded the railway.50 The Austrians blocked this town while suffering heavy losses at the bridge of Ponte Nuovo under attack by the French Guard; the French eventually succeeded in crossing the river Ticino to the west of Magenta when the 45

46 47

48 49 50

Contemporary accounts confirm that the French army was poorly prepared, see, for example Dr J-C. Chenu, Statistique médico-chirurgicale de la Campagne d’Italie en 1859 et 1860. Tome premier (Paris: Librairie militaire de J. Dumaine, 1869), XLIII; Ortholan argues that the army had been better prepared than before the Crimean War, Henri Ortholan, L’Armée du Second Empire (Mercuès: Soteca, 2009), 307; Wylly claims that the army was ‘dangerously unprepared’, Harold Carmichael Wylly C. B., The Campaign of Magenta and Solferino 1859: The Decisive Conflict for the Unification of Italy, first published 1907 (Leonaur, 2009), 12. Brooks, 2009, 9. Marder writes that Napoleon III’s frequent ‘allusion to the Italian victories of the French army under the command of his illustrious uncle (was) more than symbolic’, Marder, 10 December 2005. Ortholan, 2009, 301; Marder, 10 December 2005. Brooks, 2009, 26; Marder focuses on this faulty assumption in his study; see Marder, 10 December 2005. Brooks, 2009, 39.

Historical background of the Campaign of Italy (1859)

zouaves stormed the bridge. This movement should have been coordinated with MacMahon’s division approaching from the north.51 Only at the end of an entire day’s fighting, however, did Mac-Mahon’s Algerians arrive in order to smash the Austrian northern f lank and storm into Magenta.52 Mac-Mahon’s exclamation at the advance of his foreign legion, which he had commanded since the 1840s, became famous: ‘Here comes the legion. It’s as good as done!’53 Again, the attacking bayonet shock tactics of the zouaves had decided the day. Marder points out that this antiquated tactic was only successful in the face of Austrian rif le power due to French numerical superiority on the key axes and the passivity of the Austrian generals, who were often reluctant to engage, shielding their reserves.54 The swarming bayonet charges accounted for the final casualty count of the battle which was, according to Marder, three times as heavy as at the Battle of the Alma in the Crimea. Although losses were roughly equal on both sides after the Battle of Magenta, the Austrians withdrew during the night.55 The bayonet tactic would lend itself to the glorification of the French army and the depiction of the ‘heroic struggle’ in Yvon’s representation of the Battle of Magenta that he would paint for the Salon of 1863. In Paris, artillery fire and fireworks on 5 June announced the victory of the day before, celebrating the apparently invincible élan of the French soldiers.56 The final and most famous battle of the Italian Campaign that took place on 24 June at Solferino was classical in its epic scale and set-up, with all sovereigns present. After the allies had followed the retreating Austrians eastwards for several days, the battle was initiated when the Austrians changed direction to counter-attack. This battle was important in many respects; not only did it last for twelve hours and conclude the war, it was also the largest since Leipzig in 1813. An estimated 250,000 French, Sardinian and Austrian men took to the battlefield commanded by their three sovereigns. The terrain around Solferino was well suited to this epic battle, as Brooks notes: The ground allowed large masses of troops to move freely, its undulations providing cover for skirmishers and ample fields of fire for artillery. In the southern half of the battlefield, the Medole plain favoured cavalry and horse artillery, while manoeuvres could be directed from the high ground to the north.57 51 52 53 54 55

56 57

According to Marder, 10 December 2005. Brooks, 2009, 46. ‘Voici la Légion. L’affaire est dans le sac!’, cited in Brooks, 2009, 45. Marder, 10 December 2005; Wylly C. B., 2009, 111. Brooks, 2009, 48–49; after Napoleon III had retired for the night unaware of the French victory, he compensated in an imperial manner by promoting Mac-Mahon Maréchal de France with the title Duc de Magenta. Regnaud St Jean d’Angély was also promoted Maréchal de France, Brooks, 2009, 49. Case, 1972, 77. Brooks, 2009, 56.

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Solferino was located in the centre of this large battlefield, visible from all sides and with its large tower, the Spia d’Italia or Tower of Solferino, overlooking the whole terrain. This battle, like its predecessors, was not the result of strategic planning. Whereas at Magenta fortunes had shifted with newly arriving regiments, at Solferino most of the troops were present from the beginning, numbers of infantry amounting to 119,783 Austrians, 82,935 French and 37,174 Sardinians.58 The Austrians attacked as early as five o’clock in the morning, clashing with the French to the north of Solferino.  Napoleon III reacted quickly and decided to smash the centre of the enemy’s wide front in a concerted attack.59 The French Imperial Guard did indeed manage to break through the Austrian centre just after noon. Turning to the high ground at the Tower of Solferino, they then cleared the way for the First Corps to storm Solferino, after repeated assaults, while the Second Corps attacked the Austrian headquarters at Cavriana.60 The French, although outnumbered by the Austrians, managed to hold their ground for the rest of the day, even launching an attack shortly before bad weather ended the battle abruptly at five o’clock in the afternoon.61 A heavy downpour f looded the battlefield and cast it into darkness, an epic image that General Fleury described as follows: ‘For fifteen [sic] hours, almost four hundred thousand men lunged at each other, and as if the cannon, the shooting, the smoke, the bombs did not make enough noise, the thunder, wind and storm came and added their horror to this gigantic image.’62 The supposedly ‘Grande bataille et grande victoire!’, as Napoleon III described the Battle of Solferino in a telegraph to Empress Eugénie on the evening of the battle, had, however, a bitter aftertaste.63 The allies had lost 17,000 men, amongst them many leading generals, an unimaginably high number for a day’s battle.64 Reportedly, the emperor was shocked and silent when he visited the battlefield covered by the dead. Even the official war chronicler Bazancourt admitted: ‘A cruel thought joined the joys of triumph and painfully tightened the hearts filled with a legitimate pride.’65 Napoleon III, addressing his soldiers the next day, could not remain silent on the high death 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65

Brooks, 2009, 61. Brooks, 2009, 61–62. Brooks, 2009, 74. Brooks, 2009, 82. ‘Pendant quinze heures, près de quatre cent mille hommes se sont rués les uns sur les autres, et comme si le canon, la fusillade, la fumée, les bombes, ne faisaient pas assez de bruit, le tonnerre, le vent, l’orage sont venus ajouter leur horreur à ce tableau gigantesque.’ letter by General Fleury to his wife, written on 25 June 1859 from Cavriana, Général Cte Fleury, Souvenirs du Général Cte Fleury, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1898), 75; on the thunderstorm, also see Brooks, 2009, 86. Napoleon III cited in Bazancourt, 1859, vol. 2, 296. The Austrians lost approximately 22,000 men, Brooks, 2009, 87. ‘une cruelle pensée venait se joindre aux joies du triomphe et serrer douloureusement les cœurs enivrés d’un juste orgueil,’ Bazancourt, 1859, vol. 2, 284.

Historical background of the Campaign of Italy (1859)

toll: ‘The homeland (la patrie) […] laments, with me, those who have died on the field of honour.’ Ending his speech, the emperor rather unconvincingly assured his men that these deaths were necessary: ‘Soldiers! So much spilled blood will not be needless for the glory of France and the wellbeing of the peoples.’66 In hindsight the high casualties could easily have been avoided had the commanders relied more on manoeuvres instead of frontal attacks dating back to First Empire tactics.67 Like most of the battles fought in the Crimea, those fought in 1859 went into the annals of history as ‘battles of soldiers’, the French exploiting manpower and sharing a ‘cult of the bayonet’.68 Contemporaries in France and abroad, however, saw in the bloody victories of 1859 and the rapidity of the campaign a confirmation of the invincible furia francese and the attack à la zouave, judging France’s army the best in the world.69 Napoleon III surprised his Sardinian allies by proposing a truce to the Austrians despite the apparently decisive victory at Solferino. The treaty was officially signed by the Austrian and French emperors at Villafranca on 8 July. Apart from the carnage of Solferino, a variety of pressing reasons had impelled Napoleon III to propose the armistice prematurely without the agreement of the Piedmontese. In France, enthusiasm over the victory at Solferino was subdued when the number of deaths was made public and the desire for peace became urgent.70 As Case points out, clerical opinion in particular was increasingly hostile towards a continuation of the war, seeing papal interests threatened when revolutionary uprisings, also called the ‘Romagna revolt’, on 11 June were encouraged because Austria had felt the need to use her troops elsewhere against the French, leaving the pope unprotected.71 To this public pressure was added a more alarming reason for a quick peace settlement: the advance of 132,000 Prussian troops on France’s north-east border along the Rhine while most of the French troops were fighting in Italy, leaving France unguarded.72 The armistice drawn up by Francis Joseph and Napoleon III foresaw that the House of Savoy would receive Lombardy and stipulated that the duchies of Tuscany and Modena and the Papal Legations would be restored to their former rulers.73 The Italian Campaign has been regarded as a success for the French as it resulted – with the annexations of Savoy and Niece, which the Piedmontese had promised in return for French military support – in the restoration of the frontiers prior to the Con66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

‘La patrie […] pleure, avec moi, ceux qui sont morts au champ d’honneur […]. Soldats! Tant de sang versé ne sera pas inutile pour la gloire de la France et pour le bonheur des peuples,’ Bazancourt, 1859, vol. 2, 294. Ortholan, 2009, 312. Brooks, 2009, 12. Ortholan, 2009, 309. Case, 1972, 78–79. Case, 1972, 83–85. Brooks, 2009, 88. Cardoza, 2000, 127.

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gress of Vienna.74 In a campaign of just three months’ duration, France had shown Europe that its ‘offensive system’, inspired by national character and ‘moral energy’, was once more invincible – as it had appeared in the time of Napoleon I.75 Bazancourt concluded his official war report by repeating Napoleon  III’s words after the Battle of Solferino, suggesting that the sacrifice of 17,000 French lives had not been in vain.76 The Peace of Villafranca was announced in France on 12 July 1859 and provoked an outbreak of popular celebrations.77 Despite the victory in the Italian Campaign, Napoleon  III’s first (and last) involvement in military action had shown that he could not live up to the military genius of his uncle. The emperor endured a difficult relationship with the experienced high command, which spread rumours implying the emperor’s cowardice. Condemning them as ‘lies’, General Fleury’s account nevertheless gives an insight into the nature of the gossip when he enumerates the high command’s reproaches after the Battle of Solferino: ‘that the battle had been a surprise, that Napoleon III had not given a single order, that, irritated by the emotions of the day, he had been unable to show a sign of a single initiative’.78 In order to counter these defamations, images disseminated after the war emphasised Napoleon III’s military prowess despite his ‘The Empire means peace’ policy. In a wood-engraving published in the press at the time (Fig. 60), Napoleon III is depicted sitting on a gun-carriage in front of several gabions – military props that the trench diggers had used during the Crimean War but that by now seem to have become mere generic symbols of warfare as they appear as backdrops to most portraits of generals during the Second Empire. He leans his right arm nonchalantly on a cannon while holding in his hand a telescope, the ultimate accessory of a general in control. In a resolute gesture, his left hand rests on his upper thigh. The sword buckled onto his military uniform reminds us of the brave bayonet attacks during the Italian Campaign. Newspapers and publications such as this engraving, eventually published in the Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France (1864), were instrumental in conveying an

74

75

76 77 78

David Baguley, Napoleon  III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 172. However, as Price points out, the Italian Campaign was only a fleeting victory. Ultimately it contributed to France’s diplomatic isolation as it raised British suspicion about French expansionary politics, Italian resentment at the French annexations and Austrian hostility. See Price, 2001, 410. Canonge calls it an offensive system inspired by national character. Canonge, 1882, vol. 1, 130; Bazancourt attributes the victory to the ‘enérgie morale’ of the French troops, Bazancourt, 1859, vol. 2, 118. Bazancourt, 1859, vol. 2, 382. Case, 1972, 90–91. ‘que la bataille avait été une surprise, que Napoléon III n’avait donné aucun ordre, et qu’énervé par les émotions de la journée, il avait été incapable de faire preuve d’aucune initiative’, Fleury, 1898, vol. 2, 84.

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

Fig. 60:  ‘Napoléon III, commandant en chef de l’armée d’Italie’, press image reproduced in: Victor Duruy, Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France, vol. 3 (Paris: Hachette, 1865), 371.

immediate image of military control.79 The more traditional medium of paintings sought to align the emperor’s martial success with that of his uncle, as we shall see in the following section on Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino and its references to First Empire battle painting. Oil painting was therefore the site where Marx’s observation of history constantly repeating itself was acted out and where quite literally the (formal) language of the past was employed.80

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861) The government overtly used the Salon of 1861, the first Salon after the conclusion of the Italian Campaign, as a platform to celebrate, in more than fifty military paintings, the heroic deeds of the Armée d’Italie and Napoleon III’s leadership during the conf lict. This might seem surprising in a climate of public anti-war sentiment; however, with the emperor as commander-in-chief it seemed necessary. This year, Yvon was not concerned with a grand narrative, focusing instead on a favourable presentation of Napoleon III in his Bataille de Solférino, the largest and most prominently hung painting of 79 80

Victor Duruy, Histoire populaire contemporaine de la France, 4 vols. (Paris, 1864). Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, first published 1852 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 9–10.

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the exhibition and the costliest public commission of the year (Pl. 28).81 As we shall see, the emperor’s participation in the war changed the compositional strategies and ideological agendas of military painting in an almost anachronistic way. The focus on the emperor superseded the pictorial innovations heralded by Yvon in his painting Prise de la tour de Malakoff, (1857, Pl. 24), which had elevated the common soldier. The centre-staging of the emperor in Bataille de Solférino was, however, a failure, pleasing neither the imperial couple nor the critics, and therefore representing a major setback in the artist’s career. The painting’s pomp seemed outdated, which accounted for its critical failure and indeed called into question, in Castagnary’s words, ‘whether the genre (would) survive’.82 At the outbreak of the Italian Campaign, Yvon had been at the height of his career. The Ministère d’État, in addition to commissioning from him a portrait of the prince imperial, entrusted him with the painting of two battles of the Italian Campaign, which would be the Bataille de Solférino and Magenta, shown at the Salons of 1861 and 1863 respectively.83 As with the Malakoff paintings, the artist was also asked to paint two smaller versions of the paintings for the palace at Saint Cloud. The paintings cost 20,000 francs each and were thus the most expensive publicly commissioned works at the Salons of 1861 and 1863.84 As the decision to award the commission was made at the outset of the campaign, Yvon was able to follow the army to Italy and even stay with the high command in the imperial quarters.85 This information is interesting, as it meant that Yvon actually lived with the generals who would later figure in his paintings. In fact, it seems that Yvon became carried away and made promises while still in Italy to include certain generals with whom he got along well, as an enthusiastic letter from General Fleury to his wife written from the war zone demonstrates: ‘We have Yvon here, to whom I have given some information. I will have the honour to be in the two paintings that he has to make. We will take care of that matter when the moment comes. It will be nice for the little boys, won’t it?’86 81

82 83 84

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The decision for the commission of the painting with a payment of 20,000 francs was made on 2 January 1860. See report of the Ministère d’État, 26 April 1861, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 55. ‘si le genre dure’, Jules Antoine Castagnary, Les artistes du XIXe siècle: Salon de 1861 (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1861), 86. A note of 27 February 1861 by the Ministère d’État mentions that Yvon was supposed to execute sketches of two battle sites, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 55. Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 55. That travel expenses were not included becomes clear from a letter sent by Yvon to Achille Fould on 4 January 1861, claiming back the expenses, Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 55. General Fleury wrote to his wife that Yvon was staying in the imperial quarters with the high command and that two battle paintings had been commissioned from the artist; see letter from Valeggio, 1 July 1859, Fleury, 1898, vol. 2, 98. ‘Nous avons ici Yvon, à qui j’ai donné des indications. J’aurai l’honneur d’être dans les deux tableaux qu’il doit faire. Nous soignerons cette affaire-là quand le moment viendra. Cela

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

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Fig. 61: Adolphe Yvon, Paysage, c. 1859, pen on paper, 10.3 × 18.5 cm, Inv. RF 42520.18, Département des Arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Fig. 62: Adolphe Yvon, Vue de Solférino et des environs, c. 1859, pen on paper, 10.3 × 18.5 cm, Inv. RF 42520.20, Département des Arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

In Italy, Yvon probably saw only the very end of the Battle of Solferino. On the day of the Battle of Magenta, he had not yet arrived in Italy, and during the Battle of Solferino he was in Milan, according to his biographer Henri Jouin; however, he seems to have witnessed the final actions of Solferino thanks to General Fleury, who arranged for the artist to arrive in time for the end of the battle.87 The artist again visited the battlefield of Solferino after the battle had taken place; the shocking sight of the scattered corpses and wounded would later inspire him to paint an ambulance convoy (Evacuation des blessés, Salon of 1863).88 However, while in Italy, Yvon mainly focused on capturing the geographical features of the battlefield in pencil sketches. He seems to have explored the viewpoint from which to depict the battle beforehand: in the sketchbook

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sera agréable pour les petits garçons, n’est-ce pas?’, Fleury to his wife, letter from Valeggio of 1 July 1859, Fleury, 1898, vol. 2, 98. Jouin maintained that Yvon was in Milan when the Battle of Solferino was taking place. Henry Jouin, Adolphe Yvon: Discours prononcé le 13 septembre 1893 au nom de l’École des beauxarts en la cérémonie des obsèques du maître précédé de pages extraites des souvenirs inédits du peintre (Paris: Bureaux de L’Artiste, 1893), 43; recent scholarship suggests that Yvon arrived at the battlefield just in time to see the final actions, thanks to General Fleury, see Napoléon III et l’Italie, exh. cat., 2011, 311; Dictionnaire du Second Empire, ed. Jean Tulard (Paris: Fayard, 1995), s. v. ‘Yvon.’ The painting was acquired by an American collector from the artist according to Jouin 1893, 44. It resurfaced at a Sotheby’s sale, New York, 12 February 1997, lot 60.

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he was using during his Italian sojourn, seven drawings capture the Tower of Solferino and the surrounding terrain from different angles (for example, Fig. 61). In the final painting, he oriented the view in a south-easterly direction, positioning the viewer to the west of the battlefield. The Tower of Solferino was always meant to be the pivotal point of the composition, as a photograph of the tower taken by Yvon further suggests.89 In some sketches, Yvon indicated the generals’ positions in the composition by annotating their names (Fig. 62). It was established from the beginning that Solférino would mainly be built up of portraits, as Yvon’s three Malakoff paintings had been and as a list of names in his sketchbook suggests.90 To include the portrait of Napoleon  III was a new challenge for Yvon. The emperor had agreed to sit for him in person, but at a meeting with Yvon on 9 January 1861 he insisted on an equestrian portrait, arguing that he looked best on horseback.91 This meant that Yvon also had to ‘portray’ the emperor’s horse accurately, which posed a logistical problem as the artist’s studio was located on the second f loor and was thus inaccessible to equines. This becomes clear in a letter from Fleury – who was present at the meeting between the emperor and the artist – to Achille Fould; in this letter, Fleury asked for permission to find a provisional studio, explaining that, in addition to the problem posed by the horse, Yvon’s studio was too far away from where the emperor was lodging.92 In a subsequent meeting with Fould, Yvon was granted a temporary studio. According to Jouin, who cites Yvon’s reports to his son, the artist then started to portray the horses that were sent to him, among them that of Napoleon III.93 Jouin also informs us that, during the emperor’s visits to the artist’s studio, Yvon had a dispute with the imperial couple. Jouin’s accounts about these visits need to be treated with caution, however, as they appear exclusively in his biography of Yvon.94 According to Jouin, the emperor came to Yvon’s studio twice – once to have his whole figure on horseback outlined in a sketch (Fig. 63) and once for a more detailed portrait. If Jouin’s account is accurate, the working conditions must have been unbearable for Yvon, who had not expected the emperor to bring the empress and her ladies-inwaiting as well as high-ranking intimates and servants, all of whom would cram into Yvon’s studio.95 During the second session, Yvon made the fatal mistake of refusing the empress’ request to paint her husband with a tricorne hat instead of a képi. He argued 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Adolphe Yvon, Tour de Solférino, c. 1859, photograph, Inv. RF 42520.19, Départment des Arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Adolphe Yvon, Notes manuscrites, c. 1859, pen on paper, 10.3 × 18.5 cm, Inv. RF 42520.2, Département des Arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Jouin citing Yvon as writing to his son. See Jouin, 1893, 45. All information taken from a letter that Fleury sent to Achille Fould on 9 January 1860 after his meeting with the emperor and Yvon; see Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 55. Jouin, 1893, 45. Jouin, 1893, 46. Jouin, 1893, 45.

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

Fig. 63: Adolphe Yvon, Étude pour la bataille de Solférino, c. 1859, pen and chalk on paper, 39.8 × 30.7 cm, Inv. dessins 364, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

that he would have to change the headdress of the entire high command in the foreground of his painting were he to follow the empress’ suggestion.96 Yvon would soon feel the consequences of this little dispute, when the empress declined to order his smaller versions of the battle paintings to be hung in Saint Cloud as previously agreed. What confirms Jouin’s anecdote of the contretemps with the imperial couple is the fact that Yvon received no further official commissions for military paintings after his pictorial rendering of the Italian Campaign. Frédéric Lacaille suggests that Yvon only painted the pose of the emperor in the studio, whereas for the actual portrait he used a photograph of the emperor by the Frères Bisson (Fig. 64).97 Yvon’s portrait of the emperor in Bataille de Solférino and two further portraits – painted later, in 1862 (Fig. 65) and 1868 (Fig. 66) – do indeed resemble the photograph. In the portrait of 1862 and Bataille de Solférino, the emperor is wearing a képi and the head is turned the same way. The facial expressions revealed in the two

96 97

Jouin, 1893, 45. Frédéric Lacaille, ‘I dipinti della Campagne d’Italie: Le commissioni e gli acquisti di Napoleone III’, in Napoleone III a Brescia e a Solferino: La vittoria celebrata 1859–2009, eds. Elena Lucchesi Ragni, Maurizio Mondini and Francesca Mirandini (Brescia: Silvana Editoriale, 2009), 48; cited in Petiteau, 2011, 140, footnote 32.

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Fig. 64: Auguste-Rosalie Bisson and LouisAuguste Bisson, Napoléon III, 1860, photograph on albumen paper, Raccolte Museali Fratelli Alinari, Florence.

portraits are similar to the expressionless and static countenance in the Bisson photograph.98 A year after the incident in the artist’s studio, Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino was finished (Pl. 28). With a canvas size of six metres by nine, the emperor – at the centre of the composition and larger than life-size – was naturally the focal point of the Salon carré in 1861.99 Napoleon III furthermore dominates the foreground of the composition. Placed on top of Mount Fenile, from where he could oversee the battlefield, he sits on his horse; both are turned towards the left. As in the preparatory sketch, the emperor is seen in half-profile, pointing with his right arm towards the Tower of Solferino, which rises in the background along the central axis of the canvas. He is wearing a simple dark blue tunic and regimental red trousers, the uniform worn by commanding divisional generals, a sword belt and a peaked cap. In the canvas, his attire looks exactly the same as that worn by the other generals, although, in reality, it differed from the others’ dress through its precious silk material.100 While thus maintaining the Napoleonic notion of equality in battle, Yvon nevertheless managed to elevate the

  98   99 100

The portrait Yvon painted in 1868 differs only marginally from the other two: the head is turned further away from the viewer and is seen from slightly above. Most critics agreed on this point; for example, A.-J. Du Pays, ‘Salon de 1861’, L’Illustration 37, no. 950 (11 May 1861), 296. The emperor’s uniform worn at Solferino is held at the Musée de l’Armée, Paris, Inv. DEP 4803–4806. For a reproduction and description of the fabrics, see Napoléon III et l’Italie, exh. cat., 2011, cat. 116.

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

Fig. 65: Adolphe Yvon, Napoléon III, 1862, oil on canvas, 61.5 × 47 cm, Musée national du château de Compiègne.

Fig. 66: Adolphe Yvon, Napoléon III, 1868, oil on canvas, 55.7 × 46.7 cm, Walter Art Museum, Baltimore.

emperor by exploiting compositional means in his use of lighting, colours and arrangement of figures. As the Salon catalogue and the key that hung underneath the painting at the Salon of 1861 reveal, the emperor is looking towards General Camou, who commanded the Imperial Guard.101 Camou is depicted in the left foreground on his horse galloping away from the viewer. He looks at the emperor and waves towards him with a képi in his right hand, which suggests that he is about to carry out the emperor’s orders. Around this centre of action is arranged a static circle of figures, all of whom are placed lower than the emperor around the top of the hill on which he is located. Most look towards him, further suggesting that the painting depicts a crucial moment in which the emperor gives decisive orders. The high command mainly occupies the right half of this circle; common soldiers, shown only from behind along the left and mostly cut to half figures by the frame, are arranged along the lower and left picture margins. The perspective is constructed so that we see the common soldiers along the lower margin from above, while we see the high command from only slightly above, as the panoramic landscape beyond the high command suggests. Closing the circle behind the 101

I am suggesting that the key kept today in the file of the painting is a copy of the original; see painting file on Yvon, Bataille de Solférino, MV5016, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

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emperor is a sea of bayonets, the owners of which disappear behind a slope.102 On the ground, below the head of the emperor’s horse and facing the viewer, lies an Austrian soldier, stretching out to the emperor in a gesture seemingly begging for mercy. He is mirrored by a French zouave in front of the emperor’s horse, likewise trying to sit up at the emperor’s presence and dramatically holding his head. Of two other bodies lying on the hill, the artist permits us to see only the legs, thereby suggesting that they are dead while avoiding showing us their lifeless faces. The hazy background of the painting displays landmarks of the terrain: to the left, in the middle ground, is the burning town of Solferino from which smoke clouds rise; behind it, the dome of the convent of Solferino is clearly visible against the skyline. In front of the central axis dominated by the Tower of Solferino, one can make out cypress trees. To the right of the tower, two elevations with buildings mark the towns of Cavriana and, further to the right, Volta. Across the terrain, dispersed clouds of smoke denote the otherwise invisible enemy. Finally, it is important to note that the thunderstorm, which would end the battle, is visualised by black clouds dominating the left of the canvas. A black veil suggests heavy rain. In contrast, the right half of the scene displays a fair blue sky, and the emperor and his horse are bathed in an almost supernatural light. These transitional weather conditions support the emperor’s gesture, indicating the exact time at which he gave the decisive order. All these compositional elements in the painting serve to elevate the emperor and emphasise his role as commander-in-chief.103 The main difference between the perception of Prise de la tour de Malakoff and Bataille de Solférino was that, instead of looking up to a common soldier, the spectator was now looking up to the emperor. Charles Dollfus confirmed that the presentation of the emperor within the painting and the Salon installation created a ‘respectful distance’.104 The common soldiers are cropped by the picture margin and placed below the emperor on the hilltop.105 That the common soldiers are seen from such a high 102

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Other prominent figures include Marshal Vaillant, mounted on his horse in the right foreground, and General Fleury, likewise on horseback on the right and one of the few not looking towards the emperor. To the left of the emperor, General Manèque stands out, as he ascends the hill on his horse towards the viewer. Next to him and closer to the centre, the Capitain d’état-major de Plazanet is galloping up the hill towards the emperor and the foreground, holding up an Austrian flag with his right hand. Most critics picked up on this fact. See, for example Guyot de Frère et de l’Orne, ‘Salon de 1861’, Journal des arts, des sciences et des lettres (30 May 1861), 11; Théophile Gautier, Abécédaire du Salon de 1861 (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), 382. Charles Dollfus, ‘Salon de 1861’, Le Temps no. 13 (8 May 1861). Du Pays noted: ‘The elevated placement that the principal figure occupies on top of Hill Fenile asked that the infantrymen and the two officers on horseback be placed much lower, making them half leave the frame.’ (La situation élevé que la figure principale occupe sur le sommet du mont Fenile a obligé à placer beaucoup plus bas des fantassins et deux officiers à cheval, qui sortent à moitié du cadre.) Du Pays, 11 May 1861, 295.

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

Fig. 67: Pierre Ambroise Richebourg, ‘Central Salon / Yvon’, Hall des sculptures et cimaises du Salon de 1861, 1861, photograph on albumen paper, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

angle seems unnatural as the slope of the hill does not justify such an extreme shift in perspective, making it appear artificial and of an ideological rather than topographical nature. In the smaller version (70 by 106 cm, today in Versailles) that Yvon painted for the emperor’s personal collection, the top view of the common soldiers and their cropped bodies create an immediacy similar to photographs with views arbitrarily cut at the edges, which draws the spectator into the painting. Due to the large size of the original version (six by nine metres), however, the spectator’s actual position in front of the painting is considerably lower than the constructed viewpoint.106 A photograph by Richebourg of the Salon carré reveals that the figure of the emperor occupied a position in the room at circa 4.5 metres above f loor level (Fig. 67). Furthermore, Etienne Delécluze noted that the faces depicted in the painting were not recognisable from the distance at which the spectator was compelled to view it in order to take in the entire painting. He wrote about the painting that it had ‘such measurements that one has to place oneself at a distance of at least forty feet in order to see it without effort’, noting this as an ‘insurmountable obstacle […] to focusing on the faces, lost in the perspective distance’.107

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‘The spectator finds himself at the bottom of this hill (mount Fenile).’ (Le spectateur se trouve au bas de cette hauteur [mont Fénile].) Anonymous, L’armée française à l’exposition de peinture de 1861 (Paris: Henri Plon, 1861), 17. ‘Les habits uniformes, les armes, les équipages d’artillerie représentés de grandeur naturelle, sur un tableau dont l’étendue est telle qu’il faut se placer à quarante pieds au moins de distance pour le voir sans peine, sont des obstacles insurmontables à ce que l’intérêt se porte sur les têtes, perdues dans l’éloignement perspectif,’ Étienne-Jean Delécluze, ‘Exposition de 1861 (Deuxième article)’, Journal des débats (8 May 1861).

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The emperor’s gesture, the raised arm, is recognisable even from far away. The image of a mounted ruler with outstretched arm was familiar to viewers in the nineteenth century when the equestrian portrait underwent a revival.108 Going back to antiquity, the gesture had imperial connotations. It is a non-verbal expression of power, traditionally used to visualise the conduct of war, famously captured in Jacques-Louis David’s painting Bonaparte, Premier consul, franchissant le Grand Saint-Bernard, 20 mai 1800.109 The formalised gesture used to have a double function in history paintings, as it was supposed to both underline the commander’s power and authenticate the event visually.110 The gesture does indeed correspond to the key paragraph in the Salon catalogue, stating that ‘the emperor understands so well that the victory of the battle depends on the possession of the heights of Solferino that he does not hesitate to engage his guard’.111 The critics judged the central orchestration of the emperor to have been successfully achieved by means of composition, as Léon Lagrange’s enumeration of all its elements confirms: The action, although relegated to the background, is clearly recognisable. An intermediary episode, the piece of a cannon pointed to the left, joins it to the main ground, on which everything brings the action to mind again. The dying are scattered on the ground; the wounded, the prisoners are jumbled with the état-major. And above all, at first sight, one recognises in the centre of the painting the emperor on a horse, placed there as the centre of the action, as the soul of the battle. From him come the orders, to him come the reports: with just one word, he launches the battalions, with one gesture he stops them. His lieu-

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On the revival during the nineteenth century, see Ulrich Keller, ‘Reiterstandbild’, in Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie, eds. Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke, and Hendrik Ziegler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011), 306; it has been noted that Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino differs from equestrian portraits of the emperor in its temporal specificity, implied narrative and geographical setting. See Ashley Robertson Givens, From the Archetypal to the Intimate: Official Representations of Napoléon III, 1850–1866 (PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2012), 260. David painted five versions between 1800 and 1803, today at the Musée national du Château de Malmaison (260 × 221 cm), Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin (260 × 226 cm), Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles (271 × 232 cm and 267 × 230 cm) and Schloss Belvedere, Vienna (264 × 232 cm). Jeannet Hommers, ‘Gestik’, in Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie, eds. Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke and Hendrik Ziegler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011), 424. ‘l’Empereur comprend tellement que de la possession des hauteurs de Solférino dépend le gain de la bataille, qu’il n’hésite pas à engager sa garde’, Salon catalogue of 1861, indicated as cited from Bazancourt, 1859. See Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1861 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1861), 383.

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

tenants surround him, ready to obey; his guard cheers for him. Everything in the foreground conveys to the highest degree the idea of the supreme command.112 The notion of the emperor as the ‘soul of the battle’ that Lagrange attributes to the painting points to its traditional nature. While, in 1857, Edmond About had similarly demanded that the leading generals should form the ‘soul of the battle’ in the Crimean War paintings, the two critics imply different ideological connotations. About wanted the leader of the battle to be integrated with the rest of the fighting masses, writing that military painters should not ‘eliminate the figure of the commander-in-chief […], but reveal him in the battle’.113 Lagrange, on the other hand, thought the emperor was revealed as ‘the soul of the battle’ because all elements of the painting functioned to elevate him as the pivotal point of the action. The prominent placement of the emperor recalls First Empire military paintings with their focus on the leaders in the middle ground. Most striking is the formal allusion of Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino to the composition of Gérard’s Bataille d’Austerlitz. 2 décembre 1805 (Salon of 1810; Fig. 42).114 Here, Napoleon I, on horseback, is placed on a hilltop that not only resembles Mount Fenile in Yvon’s canvas in shape but is also arranged at the same low canvas height. Both in Bataille de Solférino and in Bataille d’Austerlitz the generals who led the decisive regiments are galloping up the hill from the background to report the successful outcome of the battle, accompanied by officers with the enemy’s f lags. The emperors are furthermore constructed as the centre of a circle of figures, dramatically lit. This direct reference to Gérard’s painting was intended, as we know from the previously cited letter to the Ministère d’État of 26 February 1858 in which Yvon upheld Gérard’s Bataille d’Austerlitz as an example to follow in order to renew ‘the thread’ of the ‘grande peinture’.115 112

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‘L’action, bien que reléguée aux plans postérieurs, s’aperçoit clairement. Un épisode intermédiaire, la pièce de canon pointée à gauche, la relie au plan principal, et sur celui-ci tout la rappelle. Des mourants jonchent le sol; des blessés, des prisonniers se mêlent à l’état-major. Et surtout, dès le premier coup d’œil, on aperçoit au centre du tableau l’Empereur à cheval, placé là comme le centre de l’action, comme l’âme de la bataille. De lui partent les ordres, à lui arrivent les rapports: d’un mot il précipite les bataillons, d’un geste il les arrête. Ses lieutenants l’entourent, prêts à obéir; sa garde l’acclame. Tout dans ce premier plan réalise au plus haut degré l’idée du commandement suprême,’ Léon Lagrange, ‘Le Salon de 1861 (3e article)’, Gazette des beaux-arts 10 (15 June 1861), 325. ‘N’effacez pas non plus la figure du général en chef, mais montrez-le dans la bataille comme l’âme se montre dans le corps,’ Edmond About, Nos artistes au Salon de 1857 (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie., 1858), 338. Austerlitz was on view in Versailles at the time, Eudore Soulié, Notice des peintures et sculptures composant le Musée Impérial de Versailles. 1er et 2e étages (Versailles: Imprimerie de MontalantBougleux, 1855), 289, 301. ‘A new effort towards la grande peinture, which lies so abandoned today although it is one of the exclusive glories of France, and to reconnect the thread shattered in the hands of the

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The arrangement of soldiers lying below the emperor’s horse, stretching out their hands, furthermore recalls the composition in Gros’ Eylau (Salon of 1808).116 Marshal Murat on his prancing horse to the right of Napoleon I is displayed from the same angle as General Camou to the left of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino. Apart from the fact that Eylau shows Napoleon I after the battle, the difference between the paintings is that Gros displayed heaps of dead soldiers in the foreground whereas Yvon avoids showing any dead too overtly, restricting their depiction to some legs. Rather than of an artistic nature, this absence probably had political rationales considering French public opinion that had been against the war after the high death toll became known. In the face of modern warfare, Yvon’s traditional composition with its focus on the emperor failed to satisfy most critics. In particular, in comparison to Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma hanging opposite at the Salon, the general impression was that Yvon had chosen a ‘theatrical’ mode, whereas Pils had opted for a ‘realistic’ mode.117 The emperor and his group seemed too rigid, and the fact that they were placed in the foreground appeared unrealistic.118 Maxime Du Camp, indirectly praising Pils for having moved the common soldiers to the foreground, wrote: Especially today (the wars of Italy and Crimea seem to have proved this) when he who wins victories is called legion; when the leading head gives way to the intelligent mass; when the general, in a word, follows his soldiers rather than guiding them, it is difficult to sum up a battle by only one character, as one was able to do with […] Napoleon at Waterloo.119

116 117 118 119

masters the country is so honoured to count as its own.’ (Un nouvel effort à la grande peinture si abandonnée de nos jours, bien qu’elle soit une des gloires exclusives de la France, et renouer le fil des grandes traditions brisé aux mains des maîtres dont le pays s’honore.) Archives nationales F21/112 dossier 54. Yvon expressed these thoughts at the same time that he was working on La gorge (1859) and La courtine (1859) but in relation to a sketch representing the Battle of Inkerman, which he attached to the letter. The painting of Inkerman was probably never finished. The composition of L’Empereur et sa maison militaire à Solferino by Janet-Lange (Salon 1861, cat. 1630) draws even more directly on Gérard’s Austerlitz but contemporaries only commented on it as reminiscent of Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino; see for example Gautier, 1861, 383–384. Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoléon Ier sur le champ de bataille d’Eylau le 9 février 1807, 1808, oil on canvas, 521 × 784 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Emile Perrin, ‘Salon de 1861’, Revue européenne 15 (1861), 366. Delécluze, 8 May 1861. ‘Aujourd’hui surtout (les guerres d’Italie et de Crimée semblent l’avoir prouvé) que celui qui remporte les victoires s’appelle légion; que la tête directrice cède sa place à la foule intelligente; que le général, en un mot, suit ses soldats au lieu de les guider, il est difficile de résumer une bataille par un seul personnage, comme on pouvait le faire par […] Napoléon à Waterloo,’ Maxime Du Camp, Le Salon de 1861 (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, A. Bourdilliat et Cie., 1861), 13.

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

Apart from the technological changes in warfare, the mass portrait was, according to critics, something that Vernet’s ‘réalisme militaire’ had introduced into the genre and that had led to the sitters becoming increasingly vocal about the correct way of portraying the battles.120 Yvon was thus forced to satisfy the demands of military personnel and paint in an ‘official language’, which no longer complied with ‘art’.121 If critics did not entirely deny the painting the status of artwork, they complained that the title of Bataille de Solférino was problematic, as the battle merely served as a backdrop for the emperor’s portrait. So many critics commented that the sole subject of the painting was the portrait of Napoleon III that Gautier noted: ‘Instead of entitling his painting Bataille de Solférino, had M. Yvon called it L’Empereur à Solférino, he would have avoided a lot of criticism.’122 Critics praised the skilfully rendered imperial horse and the accurate portrait of Napoleon III, but when confronted with the title of a battle painting they noted the absence of any sense of heroism. Lamquet was disappointed: Shouldn’t one call this canvas: Portrait in Relation to a Battle. In fact, everything that would be important in an oeuvre of this nature has been neglected or relegated to the background. The emperor, mounted on a rather beautiful horse, although stiff, occupies the centre of the canvas; to the right of the spectator are grouped, on horseback, the generals and the état-major; all these figures resemble each other, I do not doubt it, but certainly, they are cold and impassive, and one would never guess that these soldiers are inhaling the smell of powder.123

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‘If the Combat de Nazareth, the Bataille d’Aboukir and the Champ de bataille d’Eylau remain masterpieces, it is because Gros knew, despite Junot, despite Murat, despite the emperor himself, to flout the strategic demands, or rather it is because neither Junot, nor Murat, nor the emperor, dared to ask Gros for what one asks today from our battle painters.’ (Si le Combat de Nazareth, la Bataille d’Aboukir et le Champ de bataille d’Eylau restent des chefsd’œuvre, c’est que Gros a su, malgré Junot, malgré Murat, malgré l’Empereur lui-même, s’affranchir des exigences stratégiques, ou plutôt c’est que ni Junot, ni Murat, ni l’Empereur, n’auraient osé demander à Gros ce que l’on demande aujourd’hui à nos peintres de batailles.) Lagrange, 15 June 1861, 321. As noted by Dollfus: ‘The official language is rarely the one of art.’ (Le langage officiel est rarement celui de l’art.) Dollfus, 8 May 1861. ‘Au lieu d’intituler son tableau Bataille de Solférino, M. Yvon aurait dû le désigner sous le titre de l’Empereur à Solférino, il se serait par la évité bien des critiques,’ Gautier, 1861, 382. ‘Ne pourrait-on pas appeler cette toile: Portrait à propos d’une bataille. En effet, tout ce qui serait important dans une œuvre de cette nature, a été ou négligé ou rejeté dans les plans secondaires. L’Empereur, monté sur un cheval assez beau, quoique raide, occupe le milieu du tableau; à droite du spectateur se groupent, à cheval, les généraux et l’état-major, toutes ces figures sont ressemblants, je n’en doute pas, mais à coup sûr, elles sont froides et impassibles, et l’on ne supposerait jamais que ces soldats respirent l’odeur de la poudre,’ L. Lamquet, ‘Salon de 1861: Les batailles’, Les Beaux-Arts 2, no. 27 (15 May 1861), 291; Auvray praised the isolated group of the painting; see Louis Auvray, Exposition des beaux-arts: Salon de 1861 (Paris: Bureaux de la Revue Artistique, 1861), 20.

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In Yvon’s Prise the staged arrangement of the soldiers had been balanced by details such as the dead Russian soldier falling toward the viewer. In Yvon’s new painting, the immediacy of the cropping of the soldiers by the margins and the bayonets, which contemporaries perceived as extending out of the canvas, could not compensate for the wooden quality of the central group. Although Lamquet admitted that the bayonets had a similar effect to Langlois’ panoramas (which he called ‘dioramas’), Du Camp concluded about Yvon’s attempts to create visual illusions: ‘In order to be real, he arrives at the unreal.’124 Especially left-wing criticism, which advocated the specificity of persons and narrative details, dismissed the concentration on the emperor and the high command, leading Oliver Merson to dub the work as having been painted with an ‘unpardonable vulgarity’.125 That the focus on the emperor was indeed the main problem with Yvon’s painting becomes clear when one considers the copious praise heaped upon Jean-Adolphe Beaucé’s Bataille de Solférino (Salon of 1861; Fig. 68).126 In Beaucé’s rendering of the same battle, it is not the emperor but the clash of the armies that is the subject. On a long horizontal format, hundreds of small figures are concentrated in the middle ground around Casa Nuova, which, the Salon catalogue tells us, was the stronghold of the enemy.127 The high command is again in the right foreground but on the same level as the artillery on the left. The Tower of Solferino can be made out in the distance on the left, disconnected from the emperor and not serving to underline his power as it did in Yvon’s painting. The composition, with its hovering viewpoint, the position of the high command and the tree on the right, recalled Vernet’s paintings of the First Empire battles of Jemmapes (1821; Fig. 5) and Valmy (1826), which had meanwhile entered the art-historical canon.128 Despite these precedents, Beaucé’s painting at the same time struck Théophile Gautier as the only solution to the problem of how to render a modern battle and be free of the ‘ordinary rules of art’: three centres of action, seven or eight 124

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‘The bayonets emerge from the canvas as in the diaromas of Colonel Langlois.’ (Les bayonnettes sortent de la toile comme au diorama du colonel Langlois.) Lamquet, 15 May 1861, 292; ‘à force de vouloir être réel, il arrive à l’invraisemblable.’ Du Camp, 1861, 11. ‘L’état-major de l’Empereur est composé avec une impardonnable vulgarité,’ Olivier Merson, Exposition de 1861: La Peinture en France (Paris: E. Dentu, Librairie de la Société des Gens de lettres, 1861), 384; Boime links Oliver Merson’s dismissal of Yvon’s focus on the high command to the critic’s left-wing sympathies. See Albert Boime, Art in the Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871, vol. 4, A Social History of Modern Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 603. The painting used to form part of the private collection of Château d’Aufréry until recently. Granger mentions it as being in this collection in 2005, but according to the staff of the clinic now housed in the château the painting was sold recently. My arguments are based on the oil sketch for the painting, kept at the Château de Compiègne. See Catherine Granger, L’Empereur et les arts: La liste civile de Napoléon III (Paris: École des Chartes, 2005), 472. Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1861, 1861, cat. 168. Lagrange, 15 June 1861, 326.

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

Fig. 68:  Jean Adolphe Beaucé, study for Bataille de Solférino, 24 juin 1859, c. 1861, oil on paper, 86 × 171 cm, Musée national du château de Compiègne. The dimensions of the final painting are 240 × 500 cm (present whereabouts unknown).

different planes and hundreds of figures in a balanced composition without any sentimental episodes made it, according to Gautier, a painting that was modern but nevertheless ‘vrai’ and ‘grand’.129 As usual, the fact that an artist had witnessed the actual battle was perceived as a guarantee of the truthfulness of the painting.130 It seems that critics not only liked Beaucé’s painting for formal/artistic reasons but also praised it for political reasons. To highlight it as the best battle painting at the Salon when it did not foreground the emperor and was not hung in the Salon carré was in itself an affront to the government.131 Other critics were even more explicit: Maxime Du Camp, who had fought as a volunteer with Garibaldi in 1860, thought it more honest than Yvon’s painting, writing frankly:132 ‘I prefer this honest canvas a hundred times over the pompous exaggerations which I have mentioned above.’133 Ernest Vinet, too, writing for the Revue Nationale, openly admitted that he valued Beaucé’s painting because it was one of the few Battles of Solferino not showing the emperor in the foreground, 129 130

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Gautier, 1861, 379–381. Beaucé had participated in the Italian Campaign and was present during the Battle of Solferino. Critics who emphasised Beaucé’s participation in the Italian Campaign as evidence of the painting’s truthfulness included Du Camp, 1861, 14; and L’armée française à l’exposition de peinture de 1861, 1861, 18. Several critics called it the best battle painting of the Salon of 1861; see, for example, Perrin, 1861, 580; and Auvray, 1861, 29. On Du Camp’s involvement as a volunteer in Garibaldi’s Mille, see Pécout, 2011, 29. ‘Je préfère cent fois cette toile honnête aux pompeuses exagérations dont j’ai parlé plus haut,’ Du Camp, 1861, 20.

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which he thought only distracted the viewer; he concluded: ‘In the painting by M. Beaucé, the one that plays the most important role is the cannon.’134 On the left, next to Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino, hung a rendering of the same battle that focused even more closely on the deeds of common soldiers, painted by Armand-Dumaresq (Fig. 69).135 The composition was perceived as radically new. As the title Un épisode de la bataille de Solférino indicates, it shows only a fragment of the battle – to be more specific, a French ambush – which took place on the sidelines of the actual battle. The painting is divided into three horizontal strips. Thirteen French soldiers, lying on their stomachs in a leafy ditch, facing the centre of the painting and thus turning their backs to us, dominate the foreground. Their charged rif les are pointing toward the left middle ground where a group of mounted Austrian soldiers and artillery wagons are galloping from left to right. Our viewpoint is slightly hovering; like the soldiers, we look from the ditch towards the enemy. Due to perspectival foreshortening, the feet and shoe soles, arranged close to the picture plane, appear large. On the right, between the French group and the picture plane, another French soldier is crouching down, holding a bugle to his mouth and attentively watching the scene, suggesting that he is ready to blow the horn to signal an attack. To the right of this group, four French soldiers are resting underneath a tree, one sitting hunched with crossed legs. In front of the hills in the background, one can make out clouds of smoke denoting the battlefield of the Battle of Solferino with troop movement and falling soldiers. Dark colours dominate the picture and evoke the approaching thunderstorm.136 One of the reasons why this painting was perceived as radical was the heightened involvement it triggered in the viewer. Although it hung at least three metres high at the Salon, critics felt close to the soldiers, a notion expressed in their engaging language. They completed the narrative that Armand-Dumaresq had only started. The Austrian soldiers galloping from left to right with the French rif les pointed at them and the French soldier ready to blow the horn told a predetermined story, to which the Salon catalogue attested: ‘The small troop is waiting for the enemy and is preparing to shoot. The success was complete. The entire artillery fell into the hands of our soldiers.’137 However, by not showing the actual confrontation and by depicting a moment before

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‘Dans le tableau de M. Beaucé, celui qui joue le premier rôle, c’est le canon,’ Ernest Vinet, ‘Salon de 1861’, Revue nationale et étrangère 4 (10 June 1861), 444. The painting is catalogued as forming part of the collection of Versailles (MV 6863), but its present whereabouts are unknown. According to an online article of 18 November 2009 in Le Monde, it may be on permanent loan to the École militaire, Paris. See http://cicr.blog. lemonde.fr/2009/10/18/on-a-retrouve-par-hasard-un-tableau-sur-la-bataille-de-solferino/, accessed on 2 June 2016. Castagnary, 1861, 6. ‘La petite troupe attend l’ennemi et s’apprête à faire feu. Le succès fut complet. Tout l’artillerie tomba au pouvoir de nos soldats,’ Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1861, 1861, cat. 83.

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

Fig. 69:  Édouard Armand-Dumaresq, Un épisode de la bataille de Solférino, 1861, oil on canvas, 325 × 580 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles (assumed to be on permanent loan to École Supérieure de Guerre, Paris).

the action, the painting created a tension to which contemporary viewing habits were unaccustomed. In their caricatures, Cham and Galleti both demonstrated this by pretending they did not know the continuation of Armand-Dumaresq’s story: Cham suggested that the French soldiers were waiting for nurses; Galletti, like many critics, commented on the oversize shoe soles facing the viewer and supposed that the subject of the painting was the danger of suffering swollen feet after eating poisonous mushrooms.138 This temporal blank is similar to that described by Wolfgang Kemp in relation to Léon Gérôme’s L’Éxecution du Maréchal Ney (Salon of 1868), where constructed spatial and temporal pauses likewise appealed to the imagination of the viewer.139 Kemp compares these blanks to nineteenth-century literary realism, where artificial

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Cham, ‘Armand-Dumaresq – Militaires attendant l’infirmier’, Le Charivari (26 May 1861); Galletti, ‘Armand-Dumaresq: Pour avoir marché sans précaution sur les champignons venéneux,’ Salon de 1861: Album caricaturale (Paris, 1861). Léon Gérôme, L’Éxecution du Maréchal Ney, 1868, oil on canvas, 64 × 103.5 cm, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield.

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cropping likewise triggers a heightened involvement on the part of the recipient.140 Indeed, when discussing Armand-Dumaresq’s painting, Gautier confirmed the effect of the tension created by the composition, writing that he felt an impulse to warn the Austrians: ‘Don’t go that way!’141 Despite the focus on the common soldier and – or because of – the novelty of Armand-Dumaresq’s painting, it was not a critical success at the Salon of 1861. Many critics did not know what to make of it and judged it a ‘strange’ composition with a ‘strange’ foreground.142 This might seem surprising considering that critics had liked Tranchée devant Sébastopol (Salon of 1855; Pl. 27), for which Pils had employed similar compositional means to create a similar tension. The difference between the two paintings lies in their dimensions: Pils’ painting measures 1.35 by 2.20 metres and is therefore around one fifth the size of Armand-Dumaresq’s at 3.66 by six metres.143 Expecting the depiction of heroic deeds on a big canvas like this, critics condemned the French ambush as cowardly conduct, Gautier even pitying the ‘poor’ Austrians. He pointed out that the composition had its precedent in one of Raffet’s works (Fig. 70) where it had a ‘striking’ effect but that this scene was ‘too bizarre for a painting of historical size’.144 Jules Castagnary seems to have been one of the few to recognise the groundbreaking novelties of Armand-Dumaresq’s painting as a merit. He wrote: As one sees it, it is not the engagement that M. Dumaresq has represented; it is the moment that precedes the action. There is an instant of solemn waiting that is captivating, which the painter knew how to heighten very well. This conception is original and breathtaking; the effect is terrible and new. […] Altogether it forms a very remarkable battle painting.145

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Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Verständlichkeit und Spannung: Über Leerstellen in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Der Betrachter ist im Bild, ed. Wolfgang Kemp (Berlin: Reimer, 1992); translated in Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Death at Work. On Constitutive Blanks in NineteenthCentury Painting’, Representations 10 (1985), 102–123. ‘Ne passez pas là!’ Gautier, 1861, 378. For example, Du Camp, 1861, 18; and Gautier, 1861, 377. ‘The painting is a bit too big for a subject that small.’ (La toile est un peu grand pour un sujet assez mince.) Vinet, 10 June 1861, 445; Gautier asked: ‘This episode, is it worth the honour of this grand canvas?’ (Cet épisode vaut-il les honneurs d’une si grande toile?), Gautier, 1861, 376. ‘trop bizarre pour un tableau de grandeur historique’, Gautier, 1861, 379. ‘Comme on le voit, ce n’est pas l’engagement que M. Dumaresq a représenté; c’est le moment qui précède l’action. Il y a là un instant de solennelle attente, qui saisit vivement, et que le peintre a très-bien su faire valoir. Cette conception est originale et saisissante, l’effet est terrible et nouveau. […] Le tout constitue un très-remarquable tableau de bataille,’ Castagnary, 1861, 7.

Return to tradition: Yvon’s failed centre-staging of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (1861)

Fig. 70:  Auguste Raffet, Escadron à couvert prêt à attaquer, lors du siège de Rome, c. 1853, pen and brown ink on paper, 20.7 × 32.1 cm, Inv. RF 2851, Département des Arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Indeed, like Pils’ Tranchée devant Sébastopol, Armand-Dumaresq’s representation of the waiting soldiers focuses on the stretches of inactivity during war, thus capturing the human side of battle – the very opposite of Yvon’s presentation of the military victory as one man’s achievement. To focus on the emperor as Yvon did was not only problematic in artistic terms but, in the context of the Italian Campaign, must also have been politically controversial. It is important to remember that Napoleon III had started the war with the aim of dismantling Austrian dominance in Italy: as we have seen, his support for the national unification of Italy had mainly served as a pretext. Not surprisingly, Cavour and the Piedmontese were disappointed by Napoleon III’s sudden abandonment of the Italian cause at a time when the Austrians had been only partially expelled from northern Italy.146 The emperor had failed even to consult his allies, the Piedmontese, over the peace terms of Villafranca, an omission that led Cavour to resign his post, if only temporarily. Accordingly, Napoleon III’s departure from Italy stood in stark contrast to his ceremonial arrival. This time, the streets of Turin were deserted.147 His return to Paris

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Cardoza, 2000, 127. Case, 1972, 93.

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on 17 July took place with the minimum of f lourish or triumphalism, thereby standing in contrast to Yvon’s pictorial orchestration.148 Those art critics who were part of liberal and progressive France, in particular, continued to call passionately for the completion of the Italian unification process. The Republicans, too, were dissatisfied with the Villafranca terms. As a result, in 1860, many Frenchmen, among them the art critic Maxime Du Camp, joined Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand in their march to Sicily – an expedition which would defeat the Bourbon army and lead eventually to the formal declaration of the Kingdom of Italy in March 1861.149 With his 1860 publication Mémoires de Garibaldi, Alexandre Dumas, père, also active as an art critic and among the volunteers following Garibaldi, contributed crucially to the myth created around the Italian patriot in France and, indeed, all of Europe.150 As in 1849, the French also became involved in the opposite political camp, and about 3,000 French volunteers enrolled with the Zouaves pontificaux, a group whose members, from 1861 to 1870, considered themselves to be participating in a ‘Ninth Crusade’ in their protection of the pope.151 Italy’s burgeoning statehood would indeed continue to trouble Napoleon III until 1870, in the form of the ‘Roman question’: the problem of whether or not to withdraw French troops from Rome.152 The Italian Campaign was regarded as having made little difference. The art critic Edmond About, in his pamphlet La question romaine (1861), argued that the French involvement had had little effect in general: ‘In our opinion, here is what we have done. In the interest of France, nothing. In the interest of the pope, not much. In the interest of the Italian nation, even less.’153 Bearing in mind the passionate disapproval of the French deeds in Italy on the part of at least three inf luential art critics, Yvon’s pictorial triumphalism was bound to attract adverse criticism.

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Case, 1972, 94; the French public was moved to express enthusiasm only when Napoleon III finally enacted the French annexation of Savoy and Nice, with the Treaty of Turin, 24 March 1860, Case, 1972, 118–123. Maxime Du Camp, ‘L’Expédition de Garibaldi dans les Deux-Siciles, Souvenirs et Impressions personnelles’, Revue des deux mondes 33 (1 May 1861), 40–87. Alexandre Dumas, Mémoires de Garibaldi (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1860); Ignace, 2011, 60. Ignace, 2011, 62. Case, 1972, 140. ‘Quant à nous, voici ce que nous avons fait. Dans l’intérêt de la France, rien. Dans l’intérêt du pape, fort peu de chose. Dans l’intérêt de la nation italienne, moins encore,’ Edmond About, La question romaine (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), 93.

The status of military painting at the Salon of 1861

The status of military painting at the Salon of 1861 In 1861 most paintings of military subjects, accompanied by portraits of military officials, were gathered in the Salon carré, which the exhibition visitor would enter first.154 The overwhelming display of military subjects in the central room inevitably provoked debate among the critics over the artistic value of this genre. Yvon’s Solférino was hung facing the exhibition entrance. Opposite it was Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma (Fig. 47), both complemented by more military paintings and portraits of the imperial family, generals and government officials (Fig. 71, Fig. 72, Fig. 73). Standing between Yvon’s and Pils’ giant canvases, the visitor to the exhibition must have felt ambushed. Théophile Thoré was not the only critic who felt himself ‘suddenly clasped between two immense machines’.155 With so many familiar faces looking towards the Salon visitor, critics suspected the military paintings of being mere pretexts for official portraits.156 This arrangement, extending to the two adjacent rooms, departed from the rest of the display, which had been organised, for the first time, according to artists’ names in alphabetical order.157 The critic Auguste Cordier thought this arrangement convenient, as it kept the sensation-seeking crowds in this first room, while the art connoisseur could

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‘The principal salon, the Salon carré, the salon d’honneur, which one enters first of all, is striking by its red trousers and uniforms.’ (Le salon principal, le salon carré, le salon d’honneur, dans lequel on entre tout d’abord est éclatant de pantalons rouges et d’uniformes.) Léon Laurent-Pichat, Notes sur le Salon de 1861 (Lyon: L’Imprimerie du Progrès, 1861), 2. ‘subitement entreint entre deux immenses machines’, Théophile Thoré, ‘Salon de 1861’, in Salons de W. Bürger 1861 à 1868, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de Ve. Jules Renouard, 1870), 5. The effect led Paul Cézanne to pen a rhyme upon visiting the Salon of 1861: ‘I saw by Yvon a brilliant battle; / Pils in his drawing of a moving scene / Traces the memory in his stirring picture […]’ ( J’ai vu d’Yvon la bataille éclatante; / Pils donc le chic crayon d’une scène émouvante / Trace le souvenir dans son tableau vivant […]), Cézanne to Joseph Huot, letter of 4 June 1861. For the rest of the poem and a translation into English, see Paul Cézanne: Letters, ed. John Rewald (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 85, 366. ‘The battle paintings are, most of the time, not more than a pretext, than a sequence of official portraits.’ (Les tableaux de batailles ne sont plus, pour la plupart du temps, qu’un prétexte, qu’une suite de portraits officiels.) E. Delaqueville, ‘Salon de 1861 – Généralités’, Les Beaux-Arts 2 (15 May 1861), 290. ‘This year there was a great many portraits at the Salon’ (Il y avait cette année un grand nombre de portraits au Salon.) Alfred de Tanouarn, ‘Salon de 1861: Peinture historique’, Les Beaux-Arts 3, no. 31 (15 July 1861), 40. That the paintings hanging in the two adjacent rooms of the Salon carré were also official portraits and battle paintings becomes clear from de la Fizelière’s review: ‘The grand paintings and the official portraits are assigned to three vast salons, without any distinction of persons or subjects, and the mass of paintings fill the transversal galleries following the order of the first letters of the names of their author.’ (Les grandes pages et les portraits officiels sont classés dans trois vastes salons, sans distinction de personnes ou de sujets, et la masse des tableaux remplit les galeries transversales suivant l’ordre des premières lettres du nom de leur auteur.) Albert de La Fizelière, ‘Coup d’œil sur le Salon’, L’Artiste 11, no. 11 (1 June 1861), 249.

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enjoy the rest of the exhibition undisturbed.158 While it is probable that the concentration of military paintings in the central room was partly due to their large formats, the outcome was that this first room united all of the, as they were dubbed, ‘official paintings’.159 Apart from Yvon’s Solférino as the centrepiece due to its large size and prominent placement opposite the entrance, there were at least twelve other paintings commemorating the Italian Campaign that attracted critical attention. The Belgian artist Louis Paternostre’s (1824–1879) Bataille de Solférino (visible in Richebourg’s photograph, Fig. 71), another large format displayed in the Salon carré, was greeted with special acclaim by Castagnary, who bet on the artist becoming the next successful battle painter:160 His painting is well conceived. It engages at the same time in the turmoil and the strategic battle: borrowing, here, the intelligent representation of manoeuvres and the beautiful developments of the terrain, and there, the audacity of the assaults and the vehemence of the action. This is an excellent route to follow: if the genre survives, M. Paternostre will not take long to make himself known.161 Rigo’s Bataille de Magenta (combat de Marcallo), 4 juin 1859 (visible in Richebourg’s photograph, Fig. 72) was similarly a critical focus, perhaps mainly because of its massive size (4.80 by five metres) and its prominent placement in the Salon carré.162 Eugène Bellangé’s participation in the Salon was a novelty. Critics were curious to see how Hippolyte Bellangé’s son would develop and generously discussed his two representations of the Battle of Magenta; his paintings – with their numerous small figures reminiscent of tin soldiers – were indeed not dissimilar to his father’s battle pictures.163 In general, most artists who had previously represented the Crimean War now contrib-

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Auguste Cordier, ‘Le Salon de 1861’, La Critique française 1 (1861), 507. For example, Lagrange and La Fizelière attributed the arrangement to the size of the paintings, La Fizelière, 1 June 1861, 249; and Léon Lagrange, ‘Le Salon de 1861 (1er article)’, Gazette des beaux-arts 10 (15 May 1861), 202. Louis Paternostre, Bataille de Solférino, dimensions and present whereabouts unknown. ‘Sa toile est bien conçue. Elle participe à la fois de la mêlée et de la bataille stratégique: empruntant, à celle-ci, l’intelligente représentation des manœuvres et les beaux développements de terrain, à celle-là, l’audace des assauts et la véhémence de l’action. C’est là une excellente route à suivre: si le genre dure, M. Paternostre ne tardera pas à s’y faire remarquer,’ Castagnary, 1861, 86. Jules Alfred Vincent Rigo, Bataille de Magenta (combat de Marcallo), 4 juin 1859, 1861, oil on canvas, 480 × 500 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Eugène Bellangé, La garde à Magenta, 1861, oil on canvas, 200 × 301 cm, Musée des beauxarts de Dole and Un épisode de Magenta, 1861, dimensions and present whereabouts unknown.

The status of military painting at the Salon of 1861

Fig. 71: Pierre Ambroise Richebourg, ‘Central Salon / Paternostre’ Hall des sculptures et cimaises du Salon de 1861, 1861, photograph on albumen paper, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Fig. 72: Pierre Ambroise Richebourg, ‘Central Salon / Rigo’, Hall des sculptures et cimaises du Salon de 1861, 1861, photograph on albumen paper, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Fig. 73: Pierre Ambroise Richebourg, ‘Central Salon / Pils’, Hall des sculptures et cimaises du Salon de 1861, 1861, photograph on albumen paper, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

uted an Italian subject.164 The number of genre scenes showing the suffering and heroism of individual soldiers had further increased, and these were vividly discussed by 164

These include: Philippoteaux, Hippolyte Bellangé, Théodore Devilly (1818–1886), Protais, Alfred Couverchel (1834–1867), Janet-Lange, Philippe-Auguste Jeanron (1809–1877), François-Étienne Hersent (1823–1880), de Neuville, Jumel de Noireterre and Eugéne-Louis Charpentier (1811–1890).

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critics, as will be analysed in the next chapter. Paintings commemorating the Crimean War and the expeditions to Syria and China (both took place in 1860) further contributed to the impression that battle painting dominated the Salon of 1861. As the only portrait of the emperor, Yvon’s rendering of Napoleon III in Bataille de Solférino (Pl. 28) was the focus in the central room in the context of other portraits of personalities linked to the Italian War. The portraits of generals were complemented by a portrait of King Victor Emmanuel.165 Interestingly, the portrait of the folk hero Garibaldi was banished to the adjacent rooms, leaving the celebration of the French uninterrupted.166 A portrait of Pope Pius IX best demonstrates the political nature of the display.167 By an obscure German artist, Maximilien Hardtmuth, it was judged unanimously by critics as weak but was nevertheless hung in the central Salon at a time when the clergy was turning against Napoleon  III. This might have been the case because of the aforementioned Roman question, which was being fiercely debated by legislators at the time the Salon opened. Though he was in this an exception, Thoré noted that the artworks in the central Salon had a political rather than an artistic raison d’être: The Catholics are touched by the radiant benignity of Pope Pius IX […]. The saviours of Italy find the King Victor Emmanuel very gallant with his bodkin beard. Military men admire the proud composure of the marshals, who will not at all mar the series kept in Versailles. The Princess Mathilde, by M. Dubufe, the Princess Marie-Clothilde, by M. Hébert, the full-length and equestrian portraits of the prince imperial, the ministers of public works, by M. Cabanel, also have their admirers. The truth is that none of these portraits exists as works of art.168 165

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For example: General Espinasse, killed during the Battle of Magenta, was portrayed by Rigo (cat. 2694); General Camou, commander of the Imperial Guard, was depicted by Jules Cornilliet (cat. 691); Louis-Jules Trochu, general of the Third Corps of the Armée d’Italie, was commemorated in a portrait by Pierre-Paul de Pommayrac (cat. 2574). It was FrançoisGuillaime-Gabriel Lépaule’s painting of King Victor-Emmanuel (cat. 1946) that made critics aware that the portrait of the famous Garibaldi by his friend Fagnani (cat. 1045) was absent from the central room. De Callias remarked: ‘We have so far discovered only one portrait of Garibaldi.’ (Nous n’avons encore découvert qu’un seul portrait de Garibaldi.) Hector de Callias, ‘Salon de 1861’, L’Artiste 11, no. 10 (15 May 1861), 217. Maximilien Hardtmuth, Portrait de S. S. le pape Pie IX, cat. 1448, present whereabouts and dimensions unknown. ‘Les catholiques sont touchés de la bénignité rayonnante de Pie IX […]. Les sauveurs de l’Italie trouvent le roi Victor-Emmanuel très-galant avec ses crocs. Les militaires admirent la fière tenue des maréchaux, qui ne dépareront point la série conservée à Versailles. La princesse Mathilde, par M. Dubufe, la princesse Marie-Clotilde, par M. Hébert, les portraits à pied et à cheval du prince impérial, le ministre des travaux publics, par M. Cabanel, ont aussi leurs admirateurs. La vérité est qu’aucun de ces portraits n’existe comme œuvre

The status of military painting at the Salon of 1861

The political, rather than artistic, agenda of the military display in the central room evoked suspicion among the critics. The paintings were shown at a time of growing mistrust among the French population, as citizens wondered about the peaceful intentions of the government. Houssaye guessed: ‘Never before has an exhibition revealed so many battle paintings; is this consequently a sign of war?’169 De Callias alluded to Napoleon  III’s pretence that the two wars had been forced on the peaceful Second Empire against the emperor’s will: ‘A Salon that opens is the beginning of a campaign, without a doubt a peaceful campaign and one whose return every two years, in spring, one likes better than the other campaigns where the steel shines, to speak like the classical poets, and that choose for their return the same time of the year.’170 Similarly, Charles Dollfus, in his review, opined that a representative of a Peace Congress would surely have felt ill at ease when entering the first room of the exhibition, where he would face, as Maxime Du Camp called it, ‘a f lood of epaulets and red trousers’.171 The anonymous patriot who dedicated an entire book to the military paintings in the Salon was satisfied with the display as it visualised France’s military strength: ‘Fights follow fights, as in the thunderstorm lightning follows lightning: the French army marches like the lightning strikes; nothing can stand in its way, and the greater the obstacle, the more terrible the assault.’172 Most critics, however, opposed the bold martiality of the 1861 Salon, and Du Camp regretted that, instead of using the platform of the Salon to recall peaceful achievements such as industrial and scientific developments, the government chose to emphasise military victories.173 The prominent presence of military paintings at the Salon of 1861 and the failure of Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino led critics to review the theoretical framework of the genre and question its artistic value. Gautier dedicated an entire chapter to it in his book Abécédaire du Salon de 1861. With the virtual absence of major religious works, critics agreed that contemporary battle paintings were now the only representatives of the

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d’art,’ Théophile Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger 1861 à 1868, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de Ve. Jules Renouard, 1870), 6; Lamquet remarked, too: ‘[…] portraits that had the honour to figure here, thanks to the value of the illustrious persons they represent.’ ([…] des portraits qui ont eu l’honneur d’y figurer, grâce à la valeur des illustres personnages qu’il représentent.) L. Lamquet, ‘Salon de 1861: Les batailles’, Les Beaux-Arts 2, no. 28 (1 June 1861), 323. ‘Jamais une exposition n’a révélé tant de peintres de batailles; est-ce donc un signe de guerre?’ Arsène Houssaye, ‘Salon de 1861: Introduction’, L’Artiste 11, no. 9 (1 May 1861), 196. ‘Un Salon qui s’ouvre, c’est une campagne qui commence, campagne pacifique sans doute et qu’on aime mieux voir revenir tous les deux ans, au printemps, que les autres campagnes où brille l’acier, et où brûle le salpêtre, pour parler comme les poëtes classiques, et qui choisissent pour leur retour la même époque de l’année,’ Callias, 15 May 1861, 217. Dollfus, 8 May 1861; ‘un déluge d’épaulettes et de pantalons’, Du Camp, 1861, 10. ‘les combats succèdent aux combats, comme dans la tempête l’éclair succède à l’éclair: l’armée française marche comme la foudre, rien ne peut lui résister, et plus l’obstacle est grand, plus le coup est terrible,’ L’armée française à l’exposition de peinture de 1861, 1861, 9. Du Camp, 1861, 10.

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category of history painting left at the Salons, albeit unsatisfying ones.174 Many critics concurred that that year’s battle paintings were unworthy successors to Vernet’s works.175 The government’s growing demand for apparent accuracy, they hypothesised, was the main cause of this decline. It resulted in an even more purely narrative approach to depicting contemporary events, even though what was depicted was only, as Delécluze noted, an ‘official reality’.176 Delaborde summarised ‘that phrase “history painting” has today lost the meaning one once attributed to it and most often expresses the simple narration of a fact’.177 Acknowledging this break with the traditional definition of history painting, critics continued to use different terminologies to describe the representations of military subjects but most often classified them as ‘official painting’.178 In addition to the growing pressure placed on artists by the government, critics began to see the technologies of modern warfare, such as the new rif les with an unprecedentedly long range, as another obstacle for painters.179 Maxime Du Camp, for example, asked: ‘With the new rif les, the armies can engage in combat without even seeing each other: In such circumstances what should a painter do?’180 A possible solution, it seemed, was to omit the battle from the painting entirely.181 This, the critic Charles Dollfus

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178 179 180 181

For example, Albert de la Fizelière wrote: ‘With regard to history painting […] it is today barely represented apart from the genre of battles.’ (Quant à la peinture d’histoire […] elle n’est guère représentée aujourd’hui que par le genre de bataille.), La Fizelière, 1 June 1861, 249. The absence of religious paintings was noted, for example by Henri Delaborde, ‘Le Salon de 1861’, Revue des deux mondes 23 (15 June 1861), 875. However, as discussed in Chapter III, critics had difficulties classifying battle paintings as history paintings and now concluded that, as Arsène Houssaye put it, ‘it is not at the Salon that one has to study our history painters, but in the palaces and the churches.’ (Ce n’est pas au Salon qu’il faut étudier nos peintres d’histoire, mais dans les palais et dans les églises.) Houssaye, 1 May 1861, 195. For example A. Cantaloube, Lettre sur les expositions et le Salon de 1861 (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), 58. Delécluze, 8 May 1861. On the growing government pressure on military artists, see Lagrange, 15 June 1861, 322; and Du Pays, 11 May 1861, 295. ‘ce mot “peinture d’histoire” a-t-il perdu aujourd’hui la signification qu’on lui attribuait autrefois et n’exprime-t-il le plus souvent que la simple narration d’un fait’, Delaborde, 15 June 1861, 873. Du Camp, 1861, 10. The Crimean War and Italian Campaign saw the first large-scale employment of the Minié rifle, which offered a greater accuracy and longer range. See Black, 2001, 123. ‘Avec les nouveaux canons rayés, des armées peuvent maintenant combattre sans même s’apercevoir: dans de telles circonstances que peut faire un peintre?’ Du Camp, 1 May 1861, 13. Du Pays saw two solutions: ‘As to the painter, he has the choice between two parties; either he gives a view of the ensemble of the battlefield or he suppresses the general action and contents himself with representing an isolated fact that refers to it.’ (Pour le peintre, il a le choix entre deux partis; ou il donne une vue de l’ensemble du champ de bataille, ou il supprime l’action générale et se contente de représenter un fait isolé qui s’y rapporte.) Du Pays, 11 May 1861, 295.

The status of military painting at the Salon of 1861

noted, must also have been Yvon’s and Pils’ conclusion, as neither of them painted a battle.182 The absence of military engagements with the enemy in Pils’ and Yvon’s paintings had, as we have seen, opposite effects. While Pils shifted the focus away from the Battle of the Alma in order to concentrate on the common soldiers’ ascent of the Alma Heights, Yvon diverted from the Battle of Solferino to place the emperor at the centre of the canvas. The move from trying to show an overview of the battle to focusing on just the French side thus ventured into opposite ideological directions. The military hierarchy that Yvon had overthrown in 1857 by placing the common soldier Lihaut in the most prominent spot of his painting Prise de la tour de Malakoff (Pl. 24) is firmly reestablished in Bataille de Solférino.183 The awards ceremony on 3 July 1861 marked the official failure of Yvon’s commission. Although everyone of distinction in the art world, including Nieuwerkerke and Chennevières, was seated below Yvon’s Bataille de Solférino, on a stage especially built for the ceremony in the Salon carré, the painting did not receive a medal (Fig. 67).184 Artists and jury members were gathered in the rest of the room, facing both the stage and Yvon’s painting, thus making the omission even more obvious. That Pils, whose ‘realistic’ approach to the use of paint was similar to Yvon’s own, won the Médaille d’honneur for his equally large canvas confirms that the subject and consequent composition must

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Dollfus, 8 May 1861. Jouin later commented on this reversal: ‘He (Yvon) no longer found himself in front of the brave soldiers who mounted to the Malakoff assault, under the eyes of Pélissier placed in the background. Yvon had recognised all that a military scene, presented like this, offered of resources to the artist commissioned to perpetuate its souvenir. He applauded himself for the absence of the emperor who had not at all directed the operations in person. That was good luck for the artist. He did not feel obliged to concentrate the spectator’s attention on the group, immobile and too important, formed by the sovereign and his high command of general officers. On the contrary, at Solferino, that cliff could not be avoided. No artifice, no fraud possible. Adieu Lihaut, adieu my fearless zouaves, my untameable fantassins.’ (Il [Yvon] ne se trouvait plus en face des soldats valeureux qui montèrent à l’assaut de Malakoff, sous le regard de Pélissier placé au second plan. Yvon avait reconnu tout ce que la scène militaire ainsi présentée offrait de ressources à l’artiste chargé d’en perpétuer le souvenir. Il s’était applaudi de l’absence de l’Empereur qui n’avait point dirigé de sa personne les opérations. C’était une bonne fortune pour l’artiste. Il ne s’était pas vu dans l’obligation de concentrer l’attention du spectateur sur le groupe, immobile et trop éclatant, formé par le souverain et son état-major d’officiers généraux. Au contraire, à Solférino, cet écueil ne pouvait être évité. Nul subterfuge, nul fraude possible. Adieu Lihaut, adieu mes zouaves intrépides, mes indomptables fantassins.) Jouin, 1893, 44. For the set-up of the podium and Yvon’s canvas, see Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1863 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1863), vii.

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have been problematic in Yvon’s canvas.185 Pils’ so-called ‘official realism’ was given further official recognition in 1863 when the administration installed him as one of three painters in the newly founded ateliers of the École des Beaux-Arts.186 Count Walewski, the new ministre d’État, opened the ceremony with the traditional speech addressing the current state of contemporary art. This year, the main subject of the speech was le goût (taste) and this gives us another indication of why Yvon’s Solférino was perceived as a failure. As France’s most outstanding cultural value, ‘taste’ needed to be safeguarded by the jury members. Walewski used military metaphors to describe the importance of taste for France: ‘Taste is to industrial and pacific France what honour is to military France.’187 He went on to explain that taste equally added to France’s charm and grandeur, concluding that only because of its national taste did France’s art, literature and industry ‘march incessantly to the conquest of the world’.188 Walewski’s martial language and the nationalistic overtones of his speech were not directed at Yvon’s depiction of the grandest battle of recent years and the only one in which Napoleon III had participated. Instead, Yvon was publicly humiliated because he had received neither a medal nor an honourable mention, which usually came with an officially commissioned painting such as his. It is hard to say how much inf luence his dispute with the empress had had on this decision. But we do know that the military paintings that had most engaged the imperial couple during their Salon visit – namely Pils’ and Beaucé’s paintings – were subsequently honoured with awards.189 The fact that the emperor had not even paused in front of Yvon’s canvas despite being portrayed in it can be interpreted as a deliberate public gesture.190 Even while the Salon was still open, it was common knowledge that most of the large paintings had been commissioned for Versailles, and critics openly attacked the Ministère d’État for its commissioning strategies. The letters that assigned the military

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For the rest, Nieuwerkerke, who awarded the medals, mentioned only four military painters: de Neuville won a Second Class Medal, Devilly a Third Class Medal ‘with rappel’ and Beaucé and Armand-Dumaresq Third Class Medals, Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1863, 1863, xiv; the emperor purchased Beaucé’s Solférino as a gift for Marshal Niel for 8,000 francs; see Granger, 2005, 472. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 597–598; Yvon would become a professor of drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1867, Jouin, 1893, 61; and Nancy Ireson, ‘Seurat and the “Cours de M. Yvon”’, The Burlington Magazine 153, no. 1296 (March 2011), 174–180. ‘Le goût est à la France industrieuse et pacifique ce qu’est l’honneur à la France militaire,’ Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1863, 1863, X. ‘marchent incessamment à la conquête du monde,’ Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1863, 1863, x. Auvray, 1861, 15. The imperial couple only paused in front of the paintings by Pils, Beaucé and Houssot ­according to Auvray, 1861, 15.

The status of military painting at the Salon of 1861

painters to their tasks confirmed contemporary impressions that no underlying artistic agenda had guided the commissions.191 After the Salon’s closure, the contrast between the remarkable success of Pils’ canvas and the crushing failure of Yvon’s was repeated in Versailles. Regardless of the non-Crimean subject of Yvon’s painting, both Yvon’s and Pils’ canvases eventually came to hang in the Salle de Crimée, the only room left in Versailles that could house such big formats.192 Armand-Dumaresq’s painting, dubbed a genre painting, was banished to the stores of Versailles after it had originally been intended for the Second Empire display as well. Soulié justified his change of mind, arguing in a letter to Nieuwerkerke: The painting by M. Armand Dumaresq representing the taking of an Austrian artillery battery after the Battle of Solferino will not be able to find its place in this new arrangement either, but the painting was only at the Musée de Versailles provisionally, and the subject offers nothing but an episode of too little importance to be definitely part of it.193 Consequently, Armand-Dumaresq’s innovations vanished from public sight, while Yvon’s canvas remained on view despite its anachronistic character, confirming that the subject – the ruling emperor – was more important than its artistic value, which had been dismissed by critics and administration alike. Considering, in particular, the importance of the Battle of Solferino, Yvon’s painting disappointed: de la Fizelière thought that ‘one of the most beautiful victories of the century’ had been wasted if it was to be commemorated only in the manner offered by the Salon of 1861.194

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Du Camp called the commissions ‘a little bit random, without an artistic plan sufficiently elaborated in advance.’ ([…] des commandes un peu au hasard, sans plan artistique suffisamment élaboré à l’avance), Du Camp, 1861, 267. Not yet listed as hanging in the Salle de Crimée in 1865 but in 1881. See Guide au musée impérial de Versailles (Versailles: Brunox, 1865), 67; Clément de Ris, Notice du Musée historique de Versailles. Supplément: Rez-de-Chaussée, premier et deuxième étages, attique chimay (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, 1881), 37–42. ‘Le tableau de M. Armand Dumaresq représentant la prise d’une batterie d’artillerie autrichienne après la bataille de Solférino ne pourra pas non plus trouver place dans ce nouvel arrangement, mais ce tableau n’était au Musée de Versailles qu’à titre provisoire et la sujet qu’il offre n’est pas qu’un épisode trop peu important pour y figurer définitivement,’ Soulié to Nieuwerkerke, letter of 5 August 1863, Archives des musées nationaux V2. ‘une des plus belles victoires du siècle’, Albert de La Fizelière, ‘Salon de 1861’, Revue anecdotique 3, no. 12 (15 June 1861), 278.

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Back to the heroic struggle in Magenta (1863): Yvon’s failed attempt to restore his reputation as a military painter At the next Salon of 1863, Yvon attempted to restore his reputation with his painting Magenta (5.5 by 7.5 metres) (Fig. 74). It seems that the artist was endeavouring to please the critics, who had despised the official pomp of Bataille de Solférino, by shifting the viewpoint back to the heroic struggle of the common soldier. For Magenta Yvon used the compositional formula of his painting La gorge de Malakoff (Pl. 25), exhibited four years earlier in 1859. Both paintings show the goal of the battle in the background – in the case of La gorge the city of Sevastopol and in the new painting Magenta. In both, French zouaves and turcos storm from the right towards the enemy on the left. The role played by Colonel Douay in La gorge is taken on by Colonel Tixier in Magenta. At the head of the second regiment of zouaves he is pointing with his sabre in his right hand in the direction of the enemy while looking backward to his zouaves, suggesting that he is motivating them to follow him, indicating the direction and giving the order to attack. Both Douay’s and Tixier’s torsos are positioned frontally to the viewer, while their heads turn right and their right hands with sabres point left. The zouaves following this order are in both paintings marching from the right, holding their rif les vertically. In both, one zouave is blowing the clarion, indicating that the attack is just starting. Similarly, in both, the left foreground is dominated by scattered corpses and displays melodramatic scenes of wounded soldiers stretching out their hands to their comrades. In Magenta, the Austrians are mainly among the dead, recognisable by their white coats. Remarkably, Yvon portrayed one Austrian, General Clam-Gallas, who is recognisable in the distance on the left, riding from the narrow street towards the viewer, swinging his sabre. For the rest, Yvon portrayed three high-ranking French soldiers on the upper right half of the painting. De la Motterouge, whom we see only from the back, is waving with his képi towards Mac-Mahon, who is mounted, a scene which the Salon catalogue explains as ‘General Mac-Mahon gives his orders to General de la Motterouge.’195 Yvon re-used the portrait of Mac-Mahon that he had inserted into Prise de la tour de Malakoff (Pl. 24): the head is turned at exactly the same angle. Considering that Mac-Mahon was one of the principal figures in the earlier painting, which had become very famous, Yvon’s decision to simply ‘recycle’ the portrait of the general seems bold. Between the two and slightly further back, one can make out the face of General Lebrun. At the lower left margin, the white face of the dying General Espinasse stands out. He sinks into the arms of his comrades and, the Salon catalogue notes, ‘says a final farewell to his Sous-Lieutenant de Froidefond, his officier d’ordonnance

195

‘le général Mac-Mahon donne ses orders au général de La Motterouge’, Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1863, 1863, cat. 1904.

Yvon’s failed attempt to restore his reputation as a military painter

Fig. 74:  Adolphe Yvon, Magenta (4 juin 1859), 1863, oil on canvas, 550 × 750 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles (photograph by Bingham, 1863, Musée Condé, Chantilly).

and his cousin, mortally wounded at his side’.196 Indeed, the two heads are turned towards each other. The other portraits that can be identified in the tumultuous mass include three distinguished commanders and seven common zouaves. Yvon placed this entire scene into the enclosed space of the streets of Magenta, the houses of which frame the battle to the left and rear. On the right, an Italianate church tower further denotes the Italian town, and in the centre a wrecked tree peeks out of the tumult. Magenta was hung prominently in the Salon carré opposite the entrance when it was shown in 1863.197 As with La gorge, critics admired the notion of the heroic struggle it conveyed. The subject of the painting was perceived as important, as the victory at Magenta cleared the French troops’ path to Milan.198 The vivid colours were praised, critics saw overall movement in the scene and the restriction of the composition to only one part of the Battle of Magenta was welcomed. The episode of the dying General Espinasse was felt to be touching. Curiously, Gautier even praised the text in the Salon 196

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‘dit un dernier adieu au sous-lieutenant de Froidefond, son officier d’ordonnance et son cousin, frappé mortellement à ses côtés’, Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1863, 1863, cat. 1904. Auvray noted that Yvon’s painting was the first one saw when entering the Salon. See Louis Auvray, Exposition des beaux-arts: Salon de 1863 (Paris: A. Lévy Fils et aux bureaux de la Revue artistique, 1863), 22. Auvray, 1863, 23.

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catalogue, the ‘lines’ of which, he pointed out, ‘made the painting by M. Yvon immediately comprehensible’.199 Although this comment might suggest that Yvon’s painting was not self-explanatory, most critics, familiar with the development of the battle from the press, praised it for its clarity and comprehensibility. The bayonet attack, although subsequently known to have accounted for the high number of French casualties, was generally a popular subject. Just as the commanders had downplayed the power of modern weapons, Yvon’s depiction likewise ignored the advance of modern warfare. Auvray applauded the picturesqueness of this anachronism: ‘With what ardour the Turcos wield the bayonet, and what carnage in this narrow street!’200 Despite the positive reception of Yvon’s Magenta, it could not permanently restore the artist’s reputation as a battle painter. One reason was that the genre in general experienced a negative critical reception at the Salon of 1863. Mantz noted, regarding the state of military paintings: Raffet and Horace Vernet are dead; the best of our military painters, M. Pils, is missing this year; but we have the tireless M. Yvon, who tells us about the taking of Magenta, and who, with this glorious heroic deed, expels the Austrians from the green and soft Lombardy, where they did not really have a place. M. Yvon can put to the service of his brush all sorts of vulgar qualities, but it is not self-evident that it is in the nature of his talent to be a battle painter.201 Dauban warned that the times had changed and that heroic struggles, as conveyed in Magenta, were outdated. He addressed Yvon directly: ‘Beware of seeming exaggerated to the spectators who are already far away from the events and live in an Empire of peace that has substituted friendly relations for accidental hostilities.’ He added that the painting had an effect on the viewer only when he was standing in front of it and it did not leave a long-lasting impression: ‘One walks away without taking a memory, without having thought for one moment, after having been entertained as by a well-exe-

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‘Elles (les lignes) sont claires, nettes, précises, et font comprendre immédiatement le tableau de M. Yvon,’ Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1863’, Le Moniteur universel no. 143 (23 May 1863), 801. ‘Avec quelle ardeur les Turcos jouent de la baïonnette, et quel carnage dans cette rue étroite!’ Auvray, 1863, 24. ‘Raffet et Horace Vernet sont morts; le meilleur de nos peintres militaires, M. Pils, nous manque cette année; mais il nous reste l’infatigable M. Yvon, qui nous raconte la prise de Magenta, et qui, par ce glorieux fait d’armes, expulse les Autrichiens de la verte et douce Lombardie, où ils n’étaient vraiment pas à leur place. M. Yvon peut mettre au service de son pinceau toutes sortes de qualités vulgaires, mais il n’est pas bien sûr qu’il fût dans la nature de son talent de se faire peintre de bataille,’ Paul Mantz, ‘Le Salon de 1863’, Gazette des beaux-arts 14, no. 6 (1 June 1863), 490.

Yvon’s failed attempt to restore his reputation as a military painter

Fig. 75: ‘The War – Attack on the Church of Magenta’, Illustrated London News (2 July 1859).

cuted theatrical decoration.’202 As Dauban’s comment reveals, Yvon’s compositional formula was now incapable of evoking the viewer’s imagination and was thus no longer of any propagandistic value to the government. While, in 1857, the elevation of the common soldier in Yvon’s dramatic composition had still seemed realistic, by 1863, with the progress in the visual press and its less orchestrated images (for example, Fig. 75), it already seemed unconvincing.203 Magenta was the last work Yvon contributed to the collection in Versailles. In the autumn after the Salon of 1863, the artist proposed a sixth painting to the Ministère 202

203

‘Prenez garde de paraître exagéré à des spectateurs déjà éloignés des événements et placés sous l’empire d’une paix qui a substitué des relations amicales à des hostilités fortuitement accidentelles […] on s’en éloigne sans emporter de souvenir, sans avoir pensé, après s’en être amusé un instant comme d’une décoration théâtrale bien exécutée,’ C.-A. Dauban, Le Salon de 1863 (Paris: Renouard, 1863), 16. Albert Boime effectively compares the ‘inflated visual rhetoric’ of Magenta to the soberly factual newspaper illustration of the event. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 384.

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Fig. 76:  Adolphe Yvon, Évacuation des blessés (Campagne d’Italie), 1863, oil on canvas, 84 × 159 cm. Reproduced in Sotheby’s sale catalogue, New York, 29 February 1984, lot 61 (present whereabouts unknown).

d’État whose officials promised to put in a good word for him with Napoleon III to enable the commission.204 This hope, however, was crushed and Yvon, who had once even had a say in how to curate the Salle de Crimée, had his request rejected. Léon Lagrange seems to have been right when he wrote in 1861 that ‘it is rare that a painter condemns himself to such a subject without an explicit commission’, and Yvon renounced the genre of military painting entirely.205 Yvon’s resignation as a military painter had already announced itself with the artist’s second contribution to the Salon of 1863, Evacuation des blessés (Campagne d’Italie) (Fig. 76). It shows a wagon with six wounded French soldiers being pulled down a dusty country road by two oxen, lashed on by a rustic man, and followed by more wagons. The group moves from the upper right to the lower left margin of the painting, filling the entire horizontal format. Painted on canvas and measuring only 84 by 159 centimetres, it must have been intended for purchase by a private collector from the start. The subject stemmed from Yvon’s shocking encounter with the battlefield of Solferino. But, as a sole sketch of the wagon in his Italian sketchbook confirms, the painting does not show much of the ‘painful side’ of war Yvon reported after his trip.206 Bathed in a warm light and set in romanticised Italianate surroundings, the suffering of the soldiers lying on the wagon seems inoffensive. The subject is in line with Yvon’s written impressions of the battlefield:

204 205 206

Letter of 15 November 1863, Archives des musées nationaux P30 dossier 17. ‘Il est rare qu’un peintre se condamne à de tels sujets sans une commande expresse,’ Lagrange, 15 June 1861, 321. Adolphe Yvon, Charriot à bœufs, c. 1859, pen on paper, 10.3 × 18.5 cm, Inv. RF 42520.72, Département des Arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Jouin, 1893, 44.

Yvon’s failed attempt to restore his reputation as a military painter

I encountered long lines of Italian chariots that were evacuating the wounded. Big white oxen, with their slow and heavy pace, were pulling the gloomy train underneath the torrid sky. Tree branches are fixed to the chariots and give the wounded moving cover against the torrid sun and against the aggressions of f lies and cicadas.207 An American collector bought the painting after the Salon.208 In addition to the much smaller format, other qualities contributed to making the painting a collector’s piece, such as the romanticised overtone and the fact that the suffering soldiers on the wagon remained anonymous. Apart from the growing unpopularity of grand military machines, Yvon’s abandonment of military paintings can be ascribed to the fact that the dedication to portraits in his battle paintings had led to his ‘political disgrace’, as Jouin called it.209 In the case of Vernet, who had introduced this mode, the inclusion of portraits in battle paintings contributed to his popularity with successive governments. One might argue that the advanced press coverage of military events, and the consequently increasing demand for historical accuracy, made it more difficult for Yvon to display the sitters as they would have wished. This had already become clear with the placement of Pélissier in Prise. He had expressed his disappointment at being relegated to the background, although Yvon had explained that anything else would have been too obvious a twisting of the historical truth. Jouin defended Yvon on this subject, arguing: ‘The responsible one is neither Pélissier nor the emperor; it is Yvon.’210 A letter of 1865 is revealing in regard to Yvon’s stand on this subject. Yvon responded to a complaint by his former sitters who felt they had not been placed prominently enough in a painting for the Salle du Conseil de la Prefecture, defending himself: I have made enough paintings representing contemporary personages to have now the conviction that, in these sorts of paintings, the artist, even if he is Raphael, is unavoidably driven into the same impossibilities, to satisfy personal preoccupations and sensitivities, in the face of which the aim and the value of the artwork disappear.211 207

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‘Je rencontrais les longues files de chariots italiens qui évacuaient les blessés. De grands bœufs blancs menaient, de leur pas lent et pesant, le lugubre cortège sous le ciel brûlant. Des branchages fixés aux chariots faisaient aux blessés un abri mouvant contre le soleil torride et contre les agressions des mouches et des cigales,’ Jouin, 1893, 44. Jouin, 1893, 44. It more recently resurfaced in a Sotheby’s sale in New York, 29 February 1984, lot 61. Jouin, 1893, 46. ‘L’obligé, ce n’est ni Pélissier, ni l’Empereur, c’est Yvon,’ Jouin, 1893, 49. ‘J’ai fait assez de tableaux où figurent des personnages contemporains pour être arrivé à la conviction que, dans ces sortes de tableaux, l’artiste, fût il Raphaël, est invinciblement acculé

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Frustrated, he concluded his letter by saying that he felt his brush was being taken away from him and that ‘if something could console (him), it is (the fact) that this is, invariably, the destiny of all painters commissioned to paint their contemporaries’.212 The abundance of portraits in battle paintings no longer seemed topical at the beginning of the 1860s. They started to become the subject of ridicule, as a caricature by Louis Leroy demonstrates. It shows a mother and her adolescent daughter visiting the Salon. The mother reproaches her daughter for making eyes at several soldiers but forgives her when her daughter explains that she had only looked at one of the soldiers as she recognised him from one of the military paintings in the Salon, since that was a matter of ‘art’.213 Battle paintings incorporating mass portraits began to seem outdated in the face of the increasing call for historical accuracy, accelerated by the press. For the rest of his career, Yvon, who became a renowned drawing professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, no longer mixed genres, dedicating himself to painting commissioned portraits, genre scenes for the market and projects such as the decoration of the ceiling of the new Opera’s grand staircase.214 That the tensions with the imperial couple cannot have been the sole reason for Yvon’s abandonment of military subjects is confirmed by the fact that Yvon continued to paint portraits for them.215 Yvon turned his back on the genre of military painting after neither the inclusion of portraits in the narrative of the battle nor the employment of his formerly successful visual formula of the heroic struggle had been judged appropriate for picturing modern war.

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aux même impossibilités, celles de satisfaire à des préoccupations et des susceptibilités personnelles, devant qui disparaissent le but et la valeur de l’œuvre,’ Yvon to Préfecture du Département de la Seine, letter of 21 July 1865, Archives des musées nationaux P30 dossier Yvon. ‘Si quelque chose pouvait me consoler, c’est que telle a été, invariablement, la destinée de tous les peintres chargés de faire des contemporains,’ Yvon to Préfecture du Département de la Seine, letter of 21 July 1865, Archives des musées nationaux P30 dossier Yvon. ‘Mademoiselle, I forbid you to look at the soldiers like that […] it is indecent! […] Maman, it is that I thought I had seen him in the Battle of Magenta! […] Ah! That’s different […] as soon as it’s from the point of view of art!’ (Mademoiselle, je vous défend de regarder ainsi les militaires […] c’est inconvenant! […] Maman, c’est que je crois l’avoir vu dans la bataille de Magenta! […] Ah! C’est différent […], du moment que c’est au point de vue de l’art!), Louis Leroy, ‘Au Salon de 1861’, Le Charivari (13 June 1861). On Yvon’s popularity and his influence on his students’ œuvres, see Ireson, March 2011, 174–180. For example, Yvon exhibited a portrait of the prince imperial at the Salon of 1867, titled Le Prince Impérial offrant une collation aux enfants de troupe sur le champ de manœuvre du Bois de Boulogne. See Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 13 avril 1867 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1867), cat. 1573. Today the painting is in the Collection princesse Napoléon; see Granger, 2005, 704. Yvon was promoted to the Légion d’honneur on 26 June 1867; see Dictionnaire du Second Empire, 1995, s. v. ‘Yvon.’

Yvon’s failed attempt to restore his reputation as a military painter

As Tom Gretton has established in his 2006 essay on the flâneur position as elaborated in French illustrated journals, weekly magazines had by 1860 become a major component of visual culture and modern urban experience.216 We need to remember when looking at the decreasing popularity of the grandes machines at the Salons that this coincided with the popularity of these weekly periodicals. Here, images were likewise often independent of texts, as Gretton observes: ‘From the mid-1850s through to the triumph of the photomechanical half-tone after 1890, these magazines tended to display pictures as independent signifiers, neither their meaning nor their value being determined by the magazine’s texts.’217 Analysing a picture of a train crash published by Le Monde illustré, which obscures the exact surroundings of the scene by the use of sfumato effect, Gretton demonstrates that the magazines offered a ‘quasi-painterly visual pleasure’ by foregrounding the spectacular value of news, not the informational value.218 One may say that the paintings exhibited at the Salons were in fact more closely related to the news in their narrative approach which sought to visualise the official reports of battles that often accompanied the paintings in the Salon catalogues. In contrast, illustrated weeklies, as Gretton elucidates, did not compete in the market for news scoops. […] They relied on the newness of their pictures, rather than on news stories; on the dosages of the stylish, the exotic, the unforeseen, the picturesque, and the sublime which they could fit into their pages. Novelty rather than news, and variety rather than sobriety characterise their production.219 In an issue of the same magazine of 1 March 1862, the cover page displays an image of the American Civil War which is quite unlike the way war was represented at the Salons: in the centre a commander on horseback is driving his troops on the right towards the background (Fig. 77). The commander and the soldiers are turning their backs to us. One part of the battalion is cut off by the lower image border so that we can only see the caps and bayonets of some of the men. The movement on the right is contrasted on the left by two artillery wagons. A seated man is leaning against the wagon in the foreground alongside a wounded comrade lying underneath it. Although the other wagon is being pushed by two soldiers, three men are just standing around it, one in a relaxed counterpose. This latter arrangement of figures reappears in the right

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Tom Gretton, ‘Not the flâneur again: reading magazines and living the metropolis around 1880’, in The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, eds. Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006). Gretton, 2006, 95. Gretton, 2006, 109. Gretton, 2006, 101.

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Fig. 77: ‘Guerre d’Amérique. - Bataille de Mill-Spring, gagnée par le général unioniste Thomas, le 20 janvier’, Le monde illustré 10 (1 March 1862), 129.

section of Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino (Salon of 1864). The painting is unique in thus drawing on general visual culture, outside the art-historical canon, as the following section will suggest.

Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino (1864): A solution to painting modern warfare Ernest Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino, exhibited at the Salon of 1864, avoided all the traps that had led to the end of Yvon’s career as a military painter (Pl. 29). As the title indicates, in his small canvas (43.5 by 76 cm) he focused almost exclusively on portraying the high command without trying to embed it into the overall battle. The government commission dated back to 1849 when Charles Blanc, then directeur des Beaux-arts, made a case that the already famous Meissonier needed to be represented by at least one genre painting in the Musée du Luxembourg.220 Still not advanced in 1859, the commission was subsequently changed to two military paint220

Blanc noted that the government had not commissioned the artist with a single work despite his fame. Meissonier accepted the commission on 3 May 1849, which stipulated that he would be paid 4,000 francs, Ernest Meissonier: Rétrospective, exh. cat., Musée des BeauxArts de Lyon (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 166.

Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino (1864): A solution to painting modern warfare

ings, albeit still destined for the Musée du Luxembourg.221 Although Yvon’s paintings had been intended for a very different context, the circumstances of Meissonier’s commission were similar to Yvon’s. Meissonier was similarly commissioned to paint two canvases commemorating the Italian Campaign and was sent to follow the troops to Italy, although he received a considerably higher payment for both the commission itself and his travel expenses.222 This difference in remuneration is easily explained by Meissonier’s fame at this time and the fact that he received even higher prices when he sold his paintings to private collectors.223 Like Yvon, Meissonier was sent to the battlefield while the Italian Campaign was still going on and stayed with the high command in the imperial quarters.224 But whereas Meissonier enjoyed a greater popularity amongst the French public, Yvon was more respected by the military whose deeds he had immortalised in Prise de la tour de Malakoff. General Fleury’s letters reveal this difference in attitudes to the two artists; he wrote enthusiastically about Yvon’s presence among the troops but added rather brief ly: ‘Meissonier is at the imperial quarters, too. He is staying with the high command. He will bring back sketches to make small paintings.’225 Understandably, the soldiers did not feel that they would profit much from Meissonier’s tiny paintings. As Constance Hungerford’s essay on Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino demonstrates, Meissonier must also have seemed unprofessional to the soldiers, as he was inadequately prepared for his commission. At the Battle of Solferino, which Meissonier witnessed as he was riding with the high command on this day, he did not have his sketchbook to hand when the battle started.226 In fact, like Yvon, he had to return to the battlefield (albeit a year later) in order to execute landscape studies. But, rather than the battle itself, it was the role of the high command that deeply impressed Meissonier. He wrote in a letter two days after the battle: ‘Nothing was more interesting than that march of the high command.’227

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On the development of the commission from 1849 to 1859 and the background of Solférino see Hungerford, January 1980; and Constance Cain Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier: Master in His Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 115–121. Boime calls the ‘transition’ in commission from an uncontroversial genre scene to a propaganda piece an ‘advanced stage in the government’s manipulation’, Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 630. Meissonier received 25,000 francs for each painting and 10,000 francs for travel expenses; Hungerford, January 1980, 89. Yvon received 20,000 francs for each painting and 5,000 francs travel expenses, as already mentioned above. Thoré wrote in 1864: ‘He (Meissonier) is the most sought-after and the best paid modern artist.’ (Il est le plus recherché et le mieux payé des artistes modernes.) Thoré, 1870, vol. 1, 9. General Fleury in a letter to his wife from Valeggio, 1 July 1859, Fleury, 1898, vol. 2, 98. ‘Meissonier est aussi au quartier impérial. Il vit à l’état-major. Il rapportera des dessins pour faire de petites toiles,’ Fleury, 1898, vol. 2, 98. Hungerford, January 1980, 92. ‘Rien n’était plus intéressant que cette marche d’État-Major,’ letter of 26 June written from Cavriana, Hungerford, January 1980, footnote 40.

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It took Meissonier over four years to finish the painting. Considering his ambitions, his lack of preparedness and the way he planned his works, he must have put himself under immense pressure. He had always wanted to become a history painter, a desire that the increasingly derisive criticism of his bonhommes only intensified.228 He portrayed most of the military figures individually in the final painting, including Napoleon III, as we know from a sketch dated ‘Fontainebleau, 30 June 1860’.229 Numerous sketches of the high command, the horses and an artillery wagon drawn in Vincennes attest to Meissonier’s painstakingly thorough preparation.230 Meissonier started to work on the painting as early as spring 1860, and it was announced in the Salon catalogue of 1861. Gautier could already describe the painting in detail in the Gazette des beaux-arts having seen it in 1862, but it took Meissonier another two years to deliver it to the Salon of 1864.231 In line with Meissonier’s impression of the Battle of Solferino, he focused in the final painting on the high command. The group, all on horseback, is placed on a hill and dominates the left half of the canvas. The emperor, closest to the centre of the canvas, is emphasised because of his distance from the rest of the group. The depicted men are all dressed in dark blue tunics and red trousers distinguishing them as commanding divisional generals, including Napoleon III. A mounted man on the far left stands out due to his different attire – a simple dark uniform – and hunched pose; this is a self-portrait of Meissonier, who wore a ‘uniforme de fantaisie’, as a photograph of the artist in this attire shows.232 Most horses and heads are shown in profile, facing right and to the background where the Tower of Solferino and a row of cypress trees denote the centre of the battle. On the right, at the bottom of the hill, the artillery is stationed: they too are turned towards the background, some on their wagons, others standing taking aim or chatting. On the lower left, in front of the high command, the white uniforms of two dead soldiers identify them as Austrians. Just to the right of the centre, we can see a dead zouave lying parallel to the lower border of the painting. All the figures in the painting seem small, as the fertile, green, hilly landscape is given spatial precedence. Meissonier’s painting was noted for its artistic merit. Apart from their usual mockery of Meissonier’s small formats, many critics took the painting seriously, calling it a ‘history painting’. Poses and portraits as well as the composition were perceived as 228 229

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Ernest Meissonier: Rétrospective, 1993, 168–169. One of several sketches of Napoleon III that were in a sale at gallery Georges Petit, Paris, in 1893 (cat. nos. 380, 382, 852, 854 and 808), Ernest Meissonier: Rétrospective, 1993, 169, footnote 35. The sketches are dispersed, most of them having last appeared in the 1893 sale at Georges Petit. See Ernest Meissonier: Rétrospective, 1993, 168–169. Théophile Gautier, ‘Meissonier’, Gazette des beaux-arts 12 (1 Mai 1862), 419–428. Anonymous, Ernest Meissonier, en uniforme de fantaisie, 1859, albumen print, 9.5 × 5.5 cm, Inv. 3629, Fa 537, Musée de l’Armée, Paris, Napoléon III et l’Italie, exh. cat., 2011, 297, cat. 153.

Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino (1864): A solution to painting modern warfare

truthful. Gautier, especially, acclaimed Meissonier: ‘One cannot imagine the force of will that an artist needs in order to break with the traditions of a genre and to (paint) only what he sees.’233 About saw in this truthful depiction of the figures the expression of ‘pure art’.234 That Meissonier’s small canvas revealed ‘grande histoire’ was a frequent aphorism used by critics.235 Gautier summarised: ‘In our opinion, L’Empereur à Solférino is, despite its small size, a true history painting, even though this name is usually only granted to large paintings in which nothing is real.’236 It is remarkable that critics accorded the title ‘history painting’ to Meissonier’s work although it was obvious that Meissonier had eschewed the usual formula for battle paintings. That he had focused solely on the high command was acknowledged as unique. About wrote that it made the spectator aware, ‘perhaps for the first time, of the tranquil and profoundly melancholic movement of the general high command, this grand manager of battles’.237 That the high command was separated from the mass of the soldiers and the carnage and not depicted in a context of theatricality was perceived as topical. Saint-Victor commented: This conception of the modern war, considered not in its action but in its thought, represented by the head, isolated from its limbs, is accurate and gripping. These days, the commander does not play the epic role he once used to play in a battle […]. His victory is nothing more than an internal act of genius and will.238 The notion of what one might term an ‘internalised battle’ was new: critics argued that, although the battle might not be visible in Meissonier’s painting, it was nonetheless implicitly embodied in the high command. For example, Clément noted: ‘M. Meissonier

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‘On n’imagine pas la force de volonté qu’il faut à un artiste pour rompre avec les traditions d’un genre et ne faire que ce qu’il voit,’ Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1864: 1er article. M. Meissonier’, Le Moniteur universel no. 139 (18 May 1864), 698. Edmond About, Salon de 1864 (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie., 1864), 75. Charles Beaurin, ‘Les Salons de 1864 et de 1865’, L’Artiste 1 (15 April 1866), 147; About, 1864, 75; Jules Claretie, Peintres et sculpteurs: Contemporains (Paris: Charpentier et Cie., 1874), 24; Gautier, 1 May 1862, 427. ‘À notre avis, l’Empereur à Solferino est, malgré sa petite dimension, un véritable tableau d’histoire, bien que ce nomme s’accorde ordinairement qu’à de grandes toiles où il n’y a rien de réel,’ Gautier, 18 May 1864, 698. ‘peut-être pour la première fois le mouvement tranquille et profondément mélancolique de l’état-major général, ce grand ressort des batailles,’ About, 1864, 75. ‘Cette conception de la guerre moderne envisagée, non dans son action, mais dans sa pensée, représentée par sa tête isolée de ses membres, est juste et frappante. Aujourd’hui, le chef ne joue plus dans la bataille le rôle épique qu’il y remplissait autrefois […]. Sa victoire n’est plus qu’un acte intérieur de génie et de volonté,’ Paul de Saint-Victor, ‘Salon de 1864’, La Presse (2 June 1864); cited in Hungerford, January 1980, 97, footnote 61.

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has us witness the battle by showing it to us, so to speak, ref lected in the attitudes and physiognomies of the characters who are leading it.’239 The painting’s artistic merits were too abstract to provide the kind of propagandistic value that Vernet’s and Yvon’s overwhelming machines had offered. Meissonier’s work lacks all the characteristics of the official military paintings usually shown in the central room: the most obvious difference is its size which was so small that it could never have had the overwhelming effect the government was usually seeking to attain with its commissions. Furthermore, the painting was not exhibited with an accompanying text in the Salon catalogue. Also, as an eyewitness account the painting was not as convincing as one might assume from the exactitude of the figures. Meissonier’s portrayal of himself among the high command, apart from being an act of vanity – especially with the artist wearing a self-designed imaginary uniform – reminded the viewer that the artist had been present during the battle. But, rather than authenticating the painting as an eyewitness account, it seemed unprofessional to include a self-portrait, as battle painters usually emphasised their objectivity by suggesting that the viewer was seeing the scene from the same viewpoint as the artist. Indeed, despite the acknowledged accuracy of Meissonier’s painting, the fact that it did not employ the usual format for showing a battle (with emotional episodes and pathos) rendered the painting’s claims that it was an eyewitness report suspect.240 Louis Auvray, in particular, attacked it for not showing any actual combat and remarked ironically (and sexistically) that it was thus at least a battle that ‘the ladies’ could also look at.241 Neither was Napoleon III shown in a particularly favourable light by this tiny painting. He seemed detached from the action, and About even compared him to a ‘cold-blooded gambler’ studying his chessboard.242 Apart from this failure to include the usual celebratory aspects of military paintings, Meissonier simply did not work quickly enough to be a military painter of use to the government – while it took Yvon just over a year to finish a painting almost 140 times as large, it took Meissonier four years.243 The usual criteria for military paintings, such as speed of execution, size and entertaining narrative as instituted by Vernet, thus did not apply to Meissonier. One could argue that, with Meissonier’s Solférino, the Second Empire emancipated itself from the official pictorial rhetoric of previous regimes. Artistically, after 239

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‘M. Meissonier nous fait assister à la bataille en nous la montrant pour ainsi dire réfléchie dans les attitudes et dans les physionomies des personnages qui la dirigent,’ Charles Clément, Études sur les beaux-arts en France (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1865), 265. Although not directly attacking Meissonier’s self-portrait, Auvray noted that the artist had included himself very prominently, and that his silhouette stood out against the sky, Louis Auvray, Exposition des beaux-arts: Salon de 1864 (Paris: Lévy fils, aux bureaux de la Revue artistique, 1864), 14. ‘C’est une bataille que les dames peuvent regarder’, Auvray, 1864, 14. ‘joueur de sang-froid’, About, 1864, 74. Comparison of sizes, Hungerford, January 1980, 94.

Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino (1864): A solution to painting modern warfare

Yvon’s spectacularly large canvases in the vein of Vernet had ceased to persuade the crowds at the Salons of 1861 and 1863, Meissonier’s canvas convinced by its sobriety; this might have been more in tune with a public familiar with the event through the press. Albert Boime suggests that the curious placement of the emperor – safely removed from the battle instead of in the midst of it – furthermore has a direct propagandistic value. In his brief analysis of Meissonier’s painting and in contrast to contemporary critics, Boime interprets the emperor’s distance from the battle as serving the ideals of the Second Empire in that it depicts with a ‘stark realism’ the victor condescendingly watching his enemy’s defeat.244 Given the contemporary critical reception of the painting, I would interpret the focus on the high command differently. The painting seems to be less about the relationship between victors and vanquished and more about the high command as the embodiment of the whole French army. The painting seems furthermore independent of art-historical models, a freedom the artist believed was essential to become ‘a master’, which he defined as ‘an artist whose works never make one think of those of some other artist’.245 Gautier claimed that Solférino was indeed sourceless: Before painting, he (Meissonier) consulted neither Salvator Rosa, nor Borgogne, nor Gros, nor Carle, nor Horace Vernet, nor Yvon nor Pils. He was inspired directly by reality, and he has provided an image so exact that it forms an illusion of reality.246 Solférino’s supposed independence from art-historical precedents seems to extend to political matters, as the canvas liberates Napoleon III from the pictorial link with his uncle. In fact, a painting of Napoleon I, also by Meissonier, hung opposite Solférino in the central Salon in 1864, but it showed the uncle in defeat. Titled Campagne de France, 1814, the painting depicts Napoleon I’s retreat after his setback in Laon in March 1814, which sealed his final defeat (Pl. 30).247 As in Solférino, the focus is solely on the high 244 245

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Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 630. ‘Le maître est celui dont les œuvres ne font pas penser à celles des autres,’ Octave Gréard, Jean-Louis Meissonier, ses souvenirs, ses entretiens (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie., 1897), 56; for more on Meissonier’s contemporary reputation as sourceless and self-referential, see Marc J. Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 151. ‘Il n’a consulté avant de peindre ni Salvator Rosa, ni le Bourguignon, ni Gros, ni Carle, ni Horace Vernet, ni Yvon, ni Pils. Il s’est inspiré directement de la réalité, et il en a donné une image tellement exacte qu’elle fait illusion,’ Théophile Gautier, ‘L’art contemporain: Meissonier, peintre d’histoire’, L’Artiste 2, no. 3 (15 August 1865), 74. The painting did not appear in the Salon catalogue and was only installed after the Salon had already opened; see, for example, Charles Gueullette, Quelques paroles inutiles sur le Salon de 1864 (Paris: Castel, 1864), 26. For a detailed analysis of the painting, see Hungerford, 1999, 122–136.

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command. But whereas Napoleon III is shown proudly erect on his horse in a summery and fertile landscape, his uncle is depicted hunched and worn out, carried by his horse through a bare winter landscape. Due to their similar conceptions and positioning at the Salon, many critics perceived the paintings as a pair, if not, like Edmond About, as an ‘antithesis’.248 About explained: ‘It is again a high command painting, but a high command on the run.’249 The painting was the first of Meissonier’s, as he called it, ‘Napoleonic cycle’, a series of paintings that would commemorate the events of the First Empire. It would become one of the most famous paintings of the nineteenth century.250 In 1864, hanging opposite Solférino, it indicated a new direction in the Second Empire’s propaganda scheme, which Boime, in an endnote, describes as attempting to ‘demonstrate that Napoleon III could stand on his own feet’.251 Boime interestingly quotes a Bonapartist defending this notion in 1858: ‘Maybe a day will come when […] the most beautiful title of glory of Napoleon I will be that he was the precursor of Napoleon III.’252 But though Meissonier’s pendant of the defeated uncle and the victorious nephew certainly did not suffice to outshine Napoleon I, I would like to suggest that it nevertheless pointed to a new ideological and formal independence of the genre of battle painting. When considering that Meissonier’s contribution to the Salon of 1864 had abandoned Vernet’s and Yvon’s propagandistic formula for military painting, it is important to bear in mind that the artist had not been painting for the history museum in Versailles but for a contemporary art museum, the Musée du Luxembourg.253 Meissonier himself seems to have forgotten this when he noted sadly after his unfinished second painting of the Italian Campaign, L’Empereur Napoléon III à cheval entouré de son étatmajor (1864), was moved to Luxembourg:254 ‘It is rather bitter for me, after so many years of work and effort […] to admit that I have found myself incapable of achieving, although I would have hoped to, the first thing His Majesty has requested from me.’255 248 249 250 251 252

253 254 255

About, 1864, 76. ‘C’est encore un tableau d’état-major, mais un état-major en déroute,’ About, 1864, 76. Gotlieb, 1996, 9. Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 850, endnote 147. ‘Un jour viendra peut-être où, au point de vue des intérêts de l’humanité, le plus beau titre de gloire de Napoléon Ier, ce sera d’avoir été le précurseur de Napoléon III,’ Charly Sosthène-Berthelot, Essai sur le caractère et les tendances de l’Empereur Napoléon III d’après ses écrits et ses actes (Paris: Henri Plon, 1858), 339; Boime, 2007, vol. 4, 850, endnote 147. It first hung in the imperial collection before it was donated to the Musée du Luxembourg by the emperor in 1868. See object file for inventory number MI756, Louvre documentation. Ernest Meissonier, L’Empereur Napoléon III à cheval entouré de son état-major, 1864, oil on canvas, 14.5 × 11.5 cm, Musée national du château de Compiègne. ‘C’est bien cruel pour moi, après tant d’années de travail et d’efforts […] d’avouer que je me suis trouvé impuissant de réussir, aussi bien que je l’aurais voulu, la première chose que m’a demandé Sa Majesté,’ letter probably addressed to General Fleury, cited in Paul Eudel, L’Hôtel Drouot et la curiosité en 1882, vol. 2 (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1883), 173; Ernest Meissonier: Rétrospective, 1993, 171; Hungerford, January 1980, 97, footnote 77.

Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino (1864): A solution to painting modern warfare

However, from an artistic point of view, Meissonier’s painting was, retrospectively speaking, a remarkable novelty, as critics attested. Today, scholars deny Meissonier the achievement of having broken with the conventions of military painting, arguing that the small size and arrangement of figures were a result of his training and inability to work differently, rather than a conscious plan to emancipate the emperor from the shadow of his uncle and military painting from its Vernet formula.256 Meissonier’s feeling that he had failed confirms this notion. However, the painting’s effect on the critics was very different from that of Yvon’s painting and seems to have presented a new solution for painting battles, strikingly independent of Napoleonic art-historical references. Edmond About noted: ‘The painting will remain larger, in the storage of your memory, than it actually is in its frame.’257 The three main solutions to military painting considered in this chapter each present a different depiction of battle. In Yvon’s Solférino, the visible fragments of battle act as a supportive narrative to stage the emperor. The artist’s main concern was not to convey an ethical message or a grand narrative of the war. Rather, his task was to commemorate Napoleon III’s first (and last) military engagement. To do this, he employed a First Empire visual language, thereby linking this event to the military deeds of Napoleon  I and imbuing his composition with art-historical weight. This pompous anachronism, however, seemed to bore its audience. Neither could Yvon’s self-referential attempt to draw on his own successful composition of La gorge de Malakoff in Magenta nor the theatricality of the heroic struggle and the references within the art canon persuade. Yvon’s lack of success alongside the acclaim awarded to Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma and its focus on the common soldier indicates the fall of the celebratory mode of the genre of military painting as introduced by Vernet. Meissonier’s painting of the Battle of Solferino, seemingly devoid of art-historical references and declining to glorify the emperor, finally conveyed, as Gautier claimed, a topical ‘vérité absolue’.258

256 257 258

Both Hungerford, January 1980, and Ernest Meissonier: Rétrospective, 1993 argue this; this point is not discussed in Boime, 2007. ‘Le tableau restera plus grand, dans les casiers de votre memoir, qu’il ne l’est réellement dans son cadre,’ About, 1864, 75. Gautier, 15 August 1865, 74.

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A fashion emerged in the 1860s for a new type of military painting, focusing on the private feelings of individual soldiers. This innovation was part of a wider trend in public taste, which increasingly preferred everyday scenes that were either amusing or sentimental. Alexandre Protais, in particular, explored the sentimental side of military life in his paintings of the French infantry soldier before and after battle, most famously in Le matin; avant l’attaque and Le soir; après le combat, shown at the Salon of 1863 (Pl. 31; Pl. 32). Initially (before Protais’ scenes had begun to seem repetitive) the genre was also welcomed by the critics, who praised Protais’ poetic approach to military subjects, comparing it to that of Paul de Molènes’ military novels. During the same decade, the epic rendering of contemporary events in history painting waned. It could be argued that this was partly the result of France’s lack of involvement in any major military conf lict at this time. However, even the state openly favoured more popular types of painting in the 1860s, Napoleon III himself preferring to collect paintings such as Protais’ genre scenes. While the French involvement in Mexico was commemorated in Beaucé’s officially commissioned paintings, the more famous artists such as Bellangé and Protais were represented in the central exhibition hall of the Salon by the new military genre paintings. Despite his visibility and fame at the time, Protais’ paintings in particular have today virtually fallen into oblivion, with many of them lost.1 The

1

After the nineteenth century, scholarship on Protais’ oeuvre has been introduced in Annie Bardon, Militärmalerei im Second Empire am Beispiel des Krimkrieges (PhD thesis, Universität Marburg, 1980), 87; John House, ‘Manet’s Maximilian: History Painting, Censorship and Ambiguity’, in Manet: The Execution of Maximilian. Painting, Politics, and Censorship, ed. Juliet Wilson-Bareau, exh. cat., National Gallery, London (London: National Gallery Publications, 1992); Catherine Chevillot, La collection du Musée de Grenoble. Peintures et sculptures du XIXe siècle (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1995), 241; and François Robichon, La peinture militaire française de 1871 à 1914 (Paris: Giovanangeli, 1998), 96, 156, 265. I give an overview of his career and further literature references in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (Pretsch-Rauh), eds. Andreas Beyer, Bénédicte Savoy, and Wolf Tegethoff, vol. 97 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017) s. v. ‘Protais.’ I owe a

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images they revealed of the army and of the individual soldier in particular will be a focus of this chapter, which outlines the historical circumstances that saw a decline in the army’s reputation and suggests that the paintings, which humanised the soldier, functioned to reintegrate him into society. Moral lessons were no longer drawn from heroic deeds but from the monumentalisation of the soldiers’ suffering and from recurrent themes such as friendship and everyday life. That these themes were politically ambiguous becomes clear throughout the chapter, which retraces Protais’ oeuvre chronologically. Not only did the depiction of the soldiers’ emotions often inspire the critics to meditate on the uselessness of war but, as we shall see, it also implied thentaboo subjects such as homosexual relations between soldiers. An initial discussion of Meissonier’s Solférino will introduce us to the characteristics of military genre painting.

Subjectivity in Meissonier’s Solférino (1864) and Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) As discussed in the previous chapter, contemporaries accepted Meissonier’s Solférino (Pl. 29) as a history painting, not least because it centred on the emperor as the unequivocal focus. However, that Meissonier’s military paintings share characteristics with genre paintings is suggested by Théophile Gautier’s comparison to Stendhal’s Waterloo scene in La Chartreuse de Parme (1839). Gautier argued that the works were similar in that there was no emphasis, […] no theatrical composition, no means for effect usually employed; the pure and simple truth, but this rare truth that only sees the superior spirits, a prose that becomes poetry through concision, clarity (and) justice in the characteristic traits.2 Contemporaries already considered Stendhal’s Waterloo scene a watershed in the development of the war narrative as it concentrated on the subjective experience of battle rather than battlefield strategy and military glory.3 The protagonist of the book, Fabrice del Dongo, is so disoriented by the chaos of battle that he experiences Waterloo only peripherally and in a fragmented manner. Fabrice, having followed the high com-

2

3

vast debt of gratidue to Gilles Dupont, a specialisist on Protais who has lent his valuable insights for my research. ‘Nulle emphase, […] nulle composition théâtrale, aucun des moyens à effet employés d’ordinaire; la vérité pure et simple, mais cette vérité rare que voient seulement les esprits supérieurs, une prose qui devient poésie à force de concision, de netteté, de justesse dans le trait caractéristique,’ Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1864. 1er article. M. Meissonier’, Le Moniteur universel no. 139 (18 May 1864), 698. Brian Joseph Martin, Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy & Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2011), 116.

Subjectivity in Meissonier’s Solférino and Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme

mand, which remained at a distance from the real thick of the action, is not even sure afterwards whether he has witnessed a battle at all. The innovative approach assimilates the author’s own experiences. Stendhal had served in Napoleon’s army between 1800 and 1813 and wrote in his diary about one of his last engagements in Saxony: ‘From atop the slope, we could see Bautzen perfectly […]. We saw very well […] what one can see of a battle, which is nothing.’4 Stendhal’s subjective account could indeed describe Meissonier’s composition, which shows the high command also on a hilltop, with an almost invisible military engagement in the background. It is not the battle itself but its perception that forms the main interest, subjectivity being emphasised by the decision not to present the usual objective overview of the historical event. Like the protagonists of the two works, who do not see much of the battle, both the reader of La Chartreuse de Parme and the viewer of Meissonier’s Solférino stay ‘outside’ the battle. This was noted by the art critic Chellemel-Lacour as the main parallel between Stendhal’s and Meissonier’s works, when he wrote that there are ‘two ways of seeing a battle: the inside, the turmoil, the blood, the fury and the screams, or the outside, the expanse, the backdrop, as in Waterloo by Stendhal in the Chartreuse de Parme’.5 Just as Fabrice (and, hence, the reader of La Chartreuse) is not sure whether he has actually been at Waterloo and seen a battle, so in Meissonier’s painting there is no way of knowing whether the high command is actually shown at Solferino, as was also noted by critics. According to them, Napoleon III and his staff could just as well be attending a race meeting at Longchamps or a routine field exercise in the garrison towns of Vincennes or SaintOmer.6 The minuteness of detail, achieved through the density of invisible brushstrokes in the painting and the amassing of visual descriptions in the book, endowed their scenes with an unprecedented realism. For example, while allowing Fabrice to accelerate at a fast gallop during the military action, Stendhal pauses the narrative to describe in detail the field towards which his protagonist is speeding: ‘The bottoms of the furrows 4

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‘Nous apercevons parfaitement Bautzen du haut de la pente. Nous voyons fort bien, de midi à trois heures, tout ce qu’on peut voir d’une bataille, c’est-à-dire rien,’ diary entry of 21 May 1813, in Stendhal: Journal (1811–1823), ed. Henri Martineau, vol. 5 (Paris: Le Divan, 1937), 179. ‘Il y a, je le sais, deux manières de voir une bataille: le dedans, la mêlée, le sang, la fureur et les cris, ou bien le dehors, le lointain, la coulisse, comme le Waterloo de Stendhal dans la Chartreuse de Parme,’ P. Chellemel-Lacour, ‘Le Salon de 1864’, Revue germanique et française 29, no. 3 (1 June 1864), 534. That the setting of Solférino could be Vincennes was noted by Parent. See P.-C. Parent, ‘Lettres d’un simple littérateur sur le Salon de peinture de 1864’, Le Courrier artistique 3, no. 48 (15 May 1864), 190. Chesneau wrote: ‘I don’t know whether this is the emperor at Solferino rather than at Longchamps, Saint-Omer or Satory, who directs the manoeuvres of a small war…’ ( Je ne sais si c’est bien l’Empereur à Solférino plutôt qu’à Longchamps, Saint-Omer ou Satory, dirigeant les manœuvres d’une petite guerre…), Ernest Chesneau, ‘Salon de 1864’, Le Constitutionnel no. 145 (18 May 1864).

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were full of water, and the very damp soil, which formed the crest of the furrows, was f lying off in small black lumps going three or four feet up into the air.’7 On his first reading of the Waterloo scene, Honoré de Balzac enthusiastically observed in a letter to Stendhal that it was reminiscent of the oeuvre of Philip Wouwerman, the seventeenthcentury Dutch painter.8 Just as Stendhal employs painterly effects in his writings, so Meissonier, it could be argued, uses literary techniques in his painting. As we have seen, Stendhal achieved his painterly effect by halting the f low of the narrative and indulging in detailed visual descriptions. This way of helping the reader to create mental images was a literary technique (ekphrasis) introduced to historical novels by Sir Walter Scott in the early nineteenth century.9 One can see a similar technique operating in Meissonier’s depiction of the static group where the use of painstaking detail enhances the sense of a still moment. All action is absent, and Meissonier seems to have halted the narrative of battle to portray the high command in what Gautier calls a ‘respectful immobility’.10 Although depictions of still moments that allow the viewer to draw moral lessons from a representative and mostly heroic action are traditional in ‘high art’ history painting, Meissonier’s static scene does not capture any such deed. While, in literary terms, the absence of heroic action may be said to add to the realism of Stendhal’s novel, in art-historical terms it introduces Meissonier’s work into the realm of genre paintings. The lack of heroism in Meissonier’s Solférino was noted by almost every critic who reviewed the painting in 1864, with Gautier commenting, as quoted at the beginning of this section, on its total absence of theatricality. The effect of the still moment also means that the high command appears passive in the face of a historical event as epic as the Battle of Solferino. Their calm demeanour makes the task they are performing seem routine. The quiet, greyish sky further underlines the impression that nothing spectacular is happening. Accustomed to dramatic skies in military paintings, such as the severe thunderstorm in Yvon’s painting of the Battle of Solferino, critics felt Meissonier’s overcast sky added to a sense of general boredom among the high command.11   7

  8   9

10 11

‘Le fond des sillons était plein d’eau, et la terre fort humide, qui formait la crête de ces sillons, volait en petits fragments noirs lancés à trois ou quatre pieds de haut,’ L’auteur de Rouge et Noir (Stendhal), Chartreuse de Parme (Paris: A. Dupont, 1839), 77. Honoré de Balzac to Stendhal, letter of 30 March 1839, cited in Stendhal, Die Kartause von Parma, trans. and ed. Elisabeth Edl (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2009), 797. Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 152. Walter Scott’s influence on Stendhal’s Waterloo scene was also noted by Balzac in the above-mentioned letter. ‘une immobilité respectueuse’, Gautier, 18 May 1864. ‘But the Solférino has something scattered; the high command (which is nearly the entire canvas), indifferent and tranquil, resembles a meeting of chasseurs. Add to that the pale sky, a terrain mixed with plaster and some of the I-don’t-know-what kind of green that was never grass, and you maybe have the answer to the secret of the bored and dismal notion

The history of genre painting

The evocation of the everyday aspects, the emphasis on subjective experiences and the parallels with the painting style of Dutch seventeenth-century masters are all characteristics of genre painting. Indeed, Meissonier’s oeuvre had been compared to Dutch genre painting before the Salon of 1863 due to his meticulous rendering of jolly interior scenes on small canvases. This tradition of classifying Meissonier as a genre painter surely played a part in contemporaries’ categorisation of the Solférino as a genre painting. Ultimately, Meissonier’s focus on the perception of the battle rather than the event itself is typical of genre painting.

The history of genre painting In order to understand the art-historical significance of painting contemporary military history in an everyday manner, we will at this point make a digression into the history of genre painting. Until the eighteenth century, ‘genre painting’ denoted everything that was considered below the category of history painting, upheld by the Academy as the highest form of painting.12 This included any subject that was considered not to have the morally elevating content of history painting, such as landscapes and still-lifes, and that was concerned with reproducing, rather than interpreting, reality. Art theorists and critics only started to understand figure paintings and everyday scenes as a separate category from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. In search of a definition of subjects and the manner in which they were painted, the art journalism of the day often employed Dutch and Flemish cabinet painting of the seventeenth century as a yardstick.13 Critics would write that a painting was executed in, for example, ‘the Flemish taste’ to denominate subjects of everyday life, a notion that survived into the nineteenth century.

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that dominates the painting.’ (Mais le Solférino a quelque chose de décousu; l’état-major [c’est à peut prêt tout le tableau], indifférent et tranquille, ressemble à un rendez-vous de chasseurs. Ajoutez à cela un ciel pâle, un terrain mélangé de plâtre et de je ne sais quoi de vert qui ne fut jamais de l’herbe, et vous aurez peut-être le secret de la note ennuyée et morne qui domine dans le tableau.) Chellemel-Lacour, 1 June 1864, 534; on the part played historically by the weather in how war is mediated see Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton and Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, 2010), 121. Barbara Gaethgens, ‘The Theory of French Genre Painting and Its European Courts’, in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, eds. Colin Bailey, Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, National Gallery of Art, USA, and Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 40. Colin Bailey, ‘Surveying Genre in Eighteenth-Century French Painting’, in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, eds. Colin Bailey, Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, National Gallery of Art, USA, and Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 19.

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Denis Diderot was one of the first to offer a coherent definition of genre painting. Diderot’s theorisation of the genre continued to exert a lasting inf luence on the art criticism of the nineteenth century. He was seminal in the emancipation of genre painting from 1759 onwards, when the oeuvre of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) first caught his attention at the Salon of that year.14 Four years later, Greuze’s La Piété filiale led Diderot to systematically advocate genre painting as a distinct category with specific characteristics: I really like this Greuze fellow […] To begin with, genre appeals to me; it is moral painting. Or haven’t brushes spent quite enough, indeed too much time depicting vice and debauchery? Shouldn’t we then be pleased to see them finally take on dramatic poetry to touch us, instruct us, correct us, and lead us to virtue? Take heart, Greuze, my friend, and practise morality in painting!15 What resonates from these lines is Diderot’s extolling of the genre characteristics that had formerly been reserved for history painting and that he now attributed to genre painting, namely to move and instruct the viewer. The moral appeal resulted from the viewer’s identification with the subjects: instead of heroes and historical events, the dramas of anonymous bourgeois figures could capture, instruct and improve the – bourgeois – viewer.16 The increasing political and intellectual importance of the bourgeoisie played a crucial role in the rise of the genre.17 In his Essais sur la peinture of 1766, Diderot developed his theorisation of everyday scenes as a distinct genre, comparing it to the characteristics of history painting. He countered the negative preconceptions of both genres (namely that genre painters were craftsmen and history painters dreamers), noting that both required equal mastery.18 Diderot sought to prove that both genres had their qualities but that genre painting conveyed the greater truth about nature: ‘Ah! If a sacrifice, a battle, a triumph, a public scene could be rendered with the same truth to all details like a domestic scene by Greuze or by Chardin!’19 He furthermore divided the two genres into history versus epos, heroic tragedy versus bourgeois tragedy. History painting should convey heroic 14 15 16 17 18 19

Gaethgens, 2003, 54. Diderot Salons, eds. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 233; translation in Gaethgens, 2003, 55. Barbara Gaethgens, ‘Einleitung’, in Genremalerei, ed. Barbara Gaethgens (Berlin: Reimer, 2002), 35. Gaethgens, 2003, 58. Gaethgens, 2002, 36. ‘Ah! si un sacrifice, une bataille, un triomphe, une scène publique pouvait être rendue avec la même vérité dans tous les détails, qu’une scène domestique de Greuze ou de Chardin!’ ‘Essai sur la Peinture (1766)’, in Denis Diderot: Ästhetische Schriften, eds. Friedrich Bassenge and Theodor Lücke, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), 679, 681–684.

The history of genre painting

Fig. 78:  Jean-Antoine Watteau, La Porte de Valenciennes, c. 1710, oil on canvas, 32.5 × 40.5 cm, The Frick Collection, New York.

affect whereas genre painting should reveal, by depicting familiar scenes, human affect.20 Although Diderot credited both genres with equal importance, he nevertheless adhered to their separation into different categories.21 In his ‘Salon de 1769’ he opined that the highest goal of painting remained the interpretation of reality and that this was exclusively the history painter’s task.22 The genre painter’s assignment should remain the reproduction of nature and the depiction of bourgeois life in order to stir the viewer’s empathy.23 In contrast to the Academy’s theoretical ambivalence towards and cautious acceptance of genre painting, the public’s appreciation of it accounted for its vitality and diversity, including military subjects.24 Jean-Antoine Watteau’s (1684–1721) depiction of common soldiers at leisure in La Porte de Valenciennes (c. 1710; Fig. 78) introduces the 20 21 22 23 24

Gaethgens, 2002, 36. Gaethgens, 2003, 56. ‘Salon de 1763’, in: Diderot Salons, eds. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar, vol.  4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 103–106. Gaethgens, 2002, 293; on the stirring of the viewer’s emotions in Greuze’s oeuvre see Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Bailey, 2003, 18–19.

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notions that would pervade Protais’ oeuvre of the 1860s.25 Below a decaying archway, a sentry and six infantrymen are relaxing. Two of the three soldiers chat while one of the two seated figures leans against the crumbling wall, his face turned with unseeing eyes towards the viewer. To his right a soldier is lying on his belly, asleep. As Alan Wintermute notes, the scene is characterised by a ‘delicacy of feeling and sensitivity of observation’, and Watteau’s ‘tender appreciation of manly camaraderie permeates this rendering of a moment of calm between battles’.26 Furthermore, the decaying fortifications and the soldier’s visible exhaustion, Wintermute suggests, may point to ‘Watteau’s quiet disapproval of the terrible cost inf licted on his country by the last, vain war of Louis XIV’.27 One hundred and fifty years later, as we shall see, the emaciated soldiers depicted by Protais evoked similar questions about the legitimacy of Napoleon  III’s military exploits. Greuze’s domestic interior scene La malédiction paternelle (1777; Fig. 79) is similarly permeated by criticism of the army. The patriarch on the left curses his son who is raising his arm in a farewell gesture, his body turned to the open door on the right where a mischievous-looking soldier who has persuaded him to enlist waits to take him away. The women of the family are imploring him to stay, foreseeing the downfall of the family that often followed when only sons, who could have otherwise provided labour, left peasant households.28 Arousing strong sensations with the Salon visitors, this image of domestic conf lict was at the same time a powerful critique of the army.29 Although the son had decided to enlist voluntarily, the painting nevertheless visualises the socially destructive inf luence of the army on private life. Similarly, Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845) raises the domestic impact of the Napoleonic wars in the genre painting La lecture du bulletin de la Grande Armée (1807; Salon of 1808; Fig. 80). Depicted is a working-class household – a patriarch and his son who follow the march of the troops on a map in the midst of their extended family.30 The old man points at the map while angrily looking at the young woman standing next to the table to indicate, according to Albert Boime’s reading, where her future husband is risking his life while she is being seduced by the young man sitting next to

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26 27 28 29 30

Title attributed to the painting in 1912 according to Alain Wintermute, ‘Jean-Antoine Watteau, La Porte de Valenciennes’, in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, eds. Colin Bailey, Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, National Gallery of Art, USA, and Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 122. Wintermute, 2003, 122. Wintermute, 2003, 122. Barker, 2005, 78. On the critical reaction to the painting see Barker, 2005, 206–207. On the social and historical implications of the painting see Albert Boime, ‘Louis Boilly’s Reading of the XIth and XIIth Bulletins of the Grande Armée’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 54 (1991), 381.

The history of genre painting

Fig. 79: Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La malédiction paternelle. Le fils ingrat, 1777, oil on canvas, 130 × 162 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

her, caressing her right hand.31 This moral message is positive towards the army.32 As Boime has pointed out, in Boilly’s painting the son’s military service ‘functions positively’ by solidifying the family members, while in Greuze’s paternal curse involvement in the army disunites the family.33 Genre painting, with its contemporary subject matter, increasingly came to be seen as a means of expressing and documenting social situations,34 which explains the conf lation of genre and military subjects. In the nineteenth century, with the rise of art history as a discipline, genre painting began to be more systematically theorised.35 Its intrinsic values were more emphasised, 31 32 33 34 35

Boime, 1991, 381. On morality in Boilly’s oeuvre see Susan L. Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 29–33, 57–84. Boime, 1991, 382. Gaethgens, 2002, 38. On the production and reception of genre painting in the nineteenth century see Stefanie Muhr, Der Effekt des Realen: Die historische Genremalerei des 19. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2006).

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Fig. 80: Louis-Léopold Boilly, La lecture du bulletin de la Grande Armée, 1807, oil on canvas, 47 × 60 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri.

not least because the hierarchy of genres was coming under increasing attack. The art journalism of the Second Empire can be loosely divided into the critics who rejected genre painting for corrupting the purity of history painting and those who welcomed it for its topicality. Conservative critics linked the general upsurge in the genre to the descent and demoralisation of society and more specifically to the degenerating taste of the bourgeoisie, who were the main buyers of the small formats, as they fitted into their apartments. The Salons, such critics argued, were in danger of functioning merely as salesrooms where the visitor could note down the addresses of the painters printed in the catalogue in order to acquire a painting he liked. Genre painting was dismissed as entertainment for the masses and often linked to current fashions also disseminated by the literature of the day. The conservative art critic Delécluze, in particular, regularly railed against the rise of genre painting in Le Journal des débats.36 36

See Étienne-Jean Delécluze, ‘Ouverture de l’exposition des ouvrages des artistes vivans’, Journal des débats (30 April 1863); Delécluze was a former student of David and loyally defended the classical tradition. See La Promenade du critique influent: Anthologie de la critique d’art en France, 1850–1900, eds. Jean-Paul Bouillon et al. (Paris: Hazan, 2010), 18.

The history of genre painting

Progressive critics, however, saw in genre painting the advent of a trend towards the expression of greater humanism and individualism in art. The famous proponent of ‘naturalism’, Jules-Antoine Castagnary, who demanded that art address social issues, welcomed the decline of history painting and the increasing predominance of other genres such as genre painting, writing in 1857 that: Religious painting, and historical or heroic painting, have gradually been weakened, in proportion to the weakening theocracy and monarchy, the social organisms to which they refer; their elimination, nearly complete today, is bringing about the absolute domination of genre painting, landscape, and portraiture, which stem from individualism: in art as in society, man becomes more and more man.37 For military subjects this meant that the focus lay increasingly on the individual soldier. Military genre paintings showing soldiers off-duty or before and after battle gradually replaced history paintings which commemorated actual battles. This trend had started early in the nineteenth century with the Romantic depictions of anonymous Grande Armée soldiers off-duty or veterans in the oeuvres of Charlet, Léon Cogniet (1794–1880), Bellangé, Raffet and Vernet.38 Reviewing the Salon of 1864, Charles Gueullette wrote: ‘You can see it, dear readers, if history painting tends to disappear every day, military genre has the place of honour.’39

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‘La peinture religieuse et la peinture historique ou héroïque se sont graduellement affaiblies, à mesure que s’affaiblissaient comme organismes sociaux, la théocratie et la monarchie auxquelles elles se réfèrent; leur élimination, à peu près cpmplète aujourd’hui, amène la domination absolue du genre, du paysage, du portrait, qui relèvent de l’individualisme: dans l’art comme dans la société, l’homme devient de plus en plus homme,’ Jules-Antoine Castagnary, ‘Philosophie du Salon de 1857’, in Salons (1857–1870), vol. 1 (Paris: Charpentier, 1892), 7. Translation from Robert L. Herbert, From Millet to Léger: Essays in Social Art History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 27, footnote 9. Charlet’s lithographs frequently treated the subject of the soldier off-duty. See The Hero at Home in France: Lithographs by Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet (1792–1845), ed. Tom Gretton, exh. cat., College Art Collections, University College London (London: Strang Print Room, University College London, 2004); and Susannah Lucy Walker, Order and Pleasure in the Lithographic Work of Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet (1792–1845) (PhD thesis, University College London, 2012). Vernet painted, for example, Un grenadier de la vieille garde dans la grande tenue des dimanches (1823), depicting a veteran of the Old Guard playing with a little girl. See John Ingamells, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Pictures: French Nineteenth Century, vol.  2 (London: Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 1986), 269. ‘Vous le voyez, chers lecteurs, si la peinture d’histoire tend chaque jour à disparaître, le genre militaire est en grand honneur,’ Charles Gueullette, Quelques paroles inutiles sur le Salon de 1864 (Paris: Castel, 1864), 28.

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A fine line: Sentimentalism in military genre paintings by Bellangé and Protais Although mostly set during the Italian Campaign (1859), the military genre paintings produced in the 1860s become increasingly devoid of the historical references found in the genre paintings of the 1850s. They are not related to any specific military action, unlike the Crimean trench depictions, nor are they recognisably set in Italy, and critics therefore did not refer to them as genre historique. ‘Genre of tears’ was the common denomination used for Bellangé’s sentimental depictions of dying soldiers. Finally, Protais’ depictions of soldiers before and after battle were recognised as simple genre paintings. Although he had already painted two battles of the Crimean War for Versailles, Protais’ breakthrough came with these military genre paintings, for which he received medals at the three consecutive Salons of 1863, 1864 and 1865 and was decorated with the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1865.40 Protais’ genre paintings were not officially commissioned but mostly bought by private collectors or provincial museums after the Salons. Although they treated similar subjects to those of Bellangé, Protais’ genre paintings of the 1860s were more politically controversial. Despite the fact that Protais was a protégé of the imperial family and its circle, critics would perceive some of Protais’ paintings of the 1860s as ‘pamphlets against war’.41 Protais first introduced the main characteristics of his genre paintings monumentalising individual soldiers with his Salon submissions La dernière pensée (1859; Fig. 81) and La Sentinelle (1861; Fig. 82), now lost. The later La Sentinelle, in particular, announced the tendency to sentimentalism that would become the main trademark of 40

41

As mentioned in Chapter II, footnote 80, Protais was a specialised military painter, who began his career with paintings of the Crimean War. His work as a correspondant for L’Illustration from the theatre of war in the Crimea and his two paintings of battles of the Crimean War that were destined to hang in the Salle de Crimée in Versailles are discussed in Chapter III, 150-152. For Protais’ career under the Third Republic, see Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon 2017, s. v. ‘Protais.’ Théophile Thoré, ‘Salon de 1865’, in Salons de W. Bürger 1861 à 1868, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie de Ve. Jules Renouard, 1870), 180. For a list of Protais’ paintings commissioned or acquired by the imperial family, see Catherine Granger, L’Empereur et les arts: La liste civile de Napoléon III (Paris: École des Chartes, 2005), 612–613. That Protais was loyal to the regime, or at least a protégé, is confirmed by the fact that he was invited to the ‘série’ in Compiègne in 1864, an annual occasion when the imperial couple held court. See Musée national du Château de Compiègne, Le comte de Nieuwerkerke: Art et pouvoir sous Napoléon III (Compiègne: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000), 110. I would like to thank Gilles Dupont for pointing out to me in an email of 2016 that Protais was also a regular at the Salons held by Nieuwerkerke and Princess Mathilde. This is confirmed by a caricature of Protais, which formed part of a caricature series of guests regularly attending Nieuwerkerke’s so-called ‘Soirées du Louvre’: Pierre-François-Eugène Giraud, Les soirées du Louvre: Protais, 1869, watercolour, 51.4 × 37.23 cm, Département Estampes et photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

A fine line: Sentimentalism in military genre paintings by Bellangé and Protais

Fig. 81: Alexandre Protais, La dernière pensée, 1859, oil on canvas, 131 × 175.5 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Limoges.

Protais’ art production of the 1860s. The painting shows a young sentry in frock coat and with a rif le, standing alone on the platform of a mountain ridge. The infertile and rocky soil of the plain yields only a few tufts of grass. In the far background, one can just discern another figure, probably another sentry posted miles away. The horizon line is low so that the youthful soldier is monumentalised in the viewer’s sight.42 The soldier’s head is turned towards the upper left corner dominated by birds which are flying away and which his eyes seem to follow. It was precisely these departing birds that disturbed the critics, as they felt they rendered the painting too sentimental. To show soldiers in such settings and situations, argued Castagnary, gave birth to an unprecedented sentimentality.43 As the Larousse dictionary confirms, the notion of sentimentality carried the same negative connotations as today, being defined as the ‘degeneracy of the senti­ ment’.44 Castagnary considered Protais’ painting to be still in the realm of sentiment but dangerously close to slipping into the sentimentalism of Paul de Molènes’ military novels, which sought to evoke ‘Christian mysticism’ in the simple soldier. The poetic 42 43 44

The dimensions of this work are unknown. Jules Antoine Castagnary, Les artistes du XIXe siècle: Salon de 1861 (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1861), 14. ‘la dégénérescence du sentiment,’ Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 14 (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1875), s. v. ‘sentimentalisme’.

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Fig. 82:  Alexandre Protais, La Sentinelle, 1861, engraving by Imprimerie de Drouart, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

Fig. 83:  Galletti, ‘Protais - La sentinelle’, in: Galletti, 1861.

attention the soldier pays to the f lying birds, Castagnary warned, was already closer to literature than to reality, resulting in ‘thought’ (pensée) becoming more important than ‘reality’ (vérité) in the painting. That the sentry’s longing glance towards the birds and his relaxed pose seemed inappropriate for the depiction of a soldier is confirmed by a caricature of the same year, which replaces the rifle with an oboe (Fig. 83).45 As we shall see in the following section, Protais’ paintings were to become increasingly sentimental.46 Bellangé’s Les deux amis was the first acclaimed painting of the new genre and raised themes that would recur in the military genre paintings of the 1860s (Fig. 84). At the Salon of 1861, the two dead friends met with overwhelming public acclaim. The two corpses occupy the centre of the canvas against the backdrop of a gloomy and barren Crimean landscape. One lies sprawled while the other’s head rests on his friend’s belly, his left hand affectionately clasping his comrade’s torso. A group of three officers in the right foreground note the dead friends’ names with a professional and detached 45 46

Galletti, Salon de 1861: Album caricatural (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, A. Bourdilliat et Cie., 1861). His La dernière pensée (Salon of 1859) is an early example of this heightened sentimentalism.

A fine line: Sentimentalism in military genre paintings by Bellangé and Protais

Fig. 84: Hippolyte Bellangé, Les deux amis, 1861, photograph by Goupil et Cie., Musée Condé, Chantilly (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

air. The only ones looking at the corpses are an old zouave in the left foreground who sits on a bier in a hunched pose, contemplating the scene, and a younger zouave standing behind him with dangling arms. In the background, one can make out scattered corpses and the silhouettes of soldiers trying to help the wounded. The gabions on the left denote the terrain as Crimean. The depiction of dying comrades struck a chord with Salon visitors. Critics were intrigued by how the painting spoke to the viewers; Lagrange noted when discussing Les deux amis: ‘This emotion wins over the spectator quickly, so much does the scene explain itself and speak to the eyes with the language of the heart.’47 This ‘language of the heart’ was, critics argued, the consequence of an artistic interpretation of facts.48 47

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‘Cette émotion gagne bien vite le spectateur, tant la scène s’explique d’elle-même et parle aux yeux le langage du cœur,’ quoted in Jules Adeline, Hippolyte Bellangé et son œuvre (Paris: A. Quantin, 1880), 43. Du Pays noted about Les dernières volontés: ‘This episode of our Crimean campaign is treated with a well-known capability that the artist uses for the manner in which he interprets the military scenes.’ (Cet épisode de notre campagne de Crimée est traité avec l’habilité bien connue que l’artiste apporte dans la manière dont il interprète les scènes militaires.) A.-J. Du Pays, ‘Salon de 1857’, L’Illustration 30, no. 753 (1 August 1857), 74.

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Les deux amis was, according to critics, inspired by an incident reported in the papers and was seen as a translation into art.49 The small format, critics felt, added to the intimate impression of the scene. The emotional effect of Bellangé’s painting was further enhanced by the fact that Les deux amis was accompanied in the livret by the last two verses from a poem that Bellangé’s son, Eugène Bellangé, had written about the incident depicted in the painting: ‘And as united two young friends have lived, / So they have been found united in their deaths.’50 Critics distanced themselves from the inherent sentimentality; Du Camp commented on the two verses that ‘luckily the painting is better than the verses’, and Merson attacked the public – or rather the ‘masses’ as he called them – directly: ‘The masses […] do not cease making of Deux Amis a success of emotion and tears.’51 The art-historical precedents for Bellangé’s concentration on the common soldier were Raffet’s and Charlet’s depictions of the First Empire grognards, the old veterans of the Grande Armée also depicted by Bellangé at the beginning of his career.52 Michael Hughes writes about the origin of this denomination of ‘grumblers’ or ‘complainers’: ‘The grenadiers of the Imperial Guard complained so much about the miserable conditions that they encountered fighting the Russians that he (Napoleon I) started to refer to them, not without affection, as “grognards”.’53 Despite their grumpiness, they were considered the most loyal soldiers of the Grande Armée. The grognards later came to stand more generally for all veterans of the Napoleonic armies and became popular through Raffet’s, Vernet’s and Charlet’s retrospective depictions, catering to the public nostalgia for the First Empire.54 In his biography of Bellangé, Jules Adeline observed that, with 49

50 51

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‘Hippolyte Bellangé translated […] a simple news fact from a journal, the illustration of the moving story of the death of two young officers who recently graduated from Saint-Cyr, and were killed in the same incident a few steps away from each other, and which was part of the Salon catalogue with two verses as a caption.’ (Hippolyte Bellangé avait traduit […] un simple fait-divers de journal, et l’illustration de l’émouvant récit de la mort de deux jeunes officiers sortis récemment de Saint-Cyr, et tués dans la même affaire à quelques pas l’un de l’autre, avait figuré au Livret du Salon avec une légende de deux vers.) Adeline, 1880, 47. ‘Et tels avaient vécu les deux jeunes amis, / Tels on les retrouvait dans le trépas unis.’ For the rest of the poem, see Adeline, 1880, 47–48. ‘heureusement que la peinture est meilleure que les vers’, Maxime Du Camp, Le Salon de 1861 (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, A. Bourdilliat et Cie., 1861), 21; ‘la foule […] ne cesse de faire aux Deux Amis un succès d’émotion et de larmes’, Olivier Merson, Exposition de 1861: La Peinture en France (Paris: E. Dentu, Librairie de la Société des Gens de lettres, 1861), 75. Many critics made the link between Bellangé, Charlet and Raffet. Bellangé’s biographer, Jules Adeline, points this out as well; see Adeline, 1880, 13. Michael J. Hughes, Forging Napoleon’s Grande Armée: Motivation, Military Culture, and Masculinity in the French Army, 1800–1808 (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), 163. Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 8, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1872), s. v. ‘grognard.’

A fine line: Sentimentalism in military genre paintings by Bellangé and Protais

the advent of the Second Empire, Bellangé had replaced the depictions of the grognard with those of the modern troupier.55 The soldiers represented in genre paintings of the 1860s were mostly referred to as troupiers, still being in active service. The notions informing Protais’ and Bellangé’s paintings – the sentimentalism and resulting evocation of the viewer’s sympathy – can already be found in the Romantic literary culture of the early nineteenth century. The military memoir, which enjoyed great popularity in the 1820s and 1830s, had similar effects on its readers and therefore had similar cultural functions.56 Just like the memoir-writing soldiers, Protais, who had actively participated in the Second Empire’s military conf licts, contributed to a national commemoration of war. The representation of war through felt experience ref lects, as Ramsey explains, ‘a growing sense of war as a totalising national experience’ during the nineteenth century.57 The nation’s war experience during the Second Empire was similarly ‘totalising’ as it was culturally mediated through the press, theatre plays, print culture and paintings. Ramsey traces the notion of sentimentalism as a ‘cultural response to war’ to the eighteenth century.58 The eighteenth-century moral philosophy propagated by David Hume and Adam Smith saw morality as stemming from sympathy, which in turn could be evoked by feeling.59 Ramsey explains Hume’s and Smith’s realisation: ‘It was through our response to another’s feelings that we could feel compassion for them (the soldiers) and thus be prompted to take moral action on their behalf. At the heart of sentimental culture, therefore, was a perception that feelings were foundational to the correct operation of morality and social behaviour.’60 This process only worked when the reader or viewer could identify with the described feelings. Inversely, when the feelings depicted

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‘At the Salon of 1855, we see Bellangé starting with the reproduction of a certain number of battles of the Second Empire. He abandons from time to time the grognards and starts to celebrate our modern troupiers.’ (Au Salon de 1855, nous voyons Bellangé commencer la reproduction d’un certain nombre de batailles du Second Empire. Il abandonne de temps à autre les grognards et commence à célébrer nos modernes troupiers.) Adeline, 1880, 29. ‘Pop. Soldier: An old troupier. The real troupier, if it is allowed here to use this word that one uses in the army to designate the people who are destined to die as captains, this serf tied to the turf of a regiment, is an essentially naïve creature.’ (Pop. Soldat: Un vieux Troupier. Le vrai troupier, s’il est permis d’employer ici le mot dont on se sert à l’armée pour désigner les gens destinés à mourir capitaines, ce serf attaché à la glèbe d’un régiment, est une créature essentiellement naïve.) Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 15, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1876), s. v. ‘troupier.’ Neil Ramsey, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011). Ramsey, 2011, 2. Ramsey, 2011, 7. Ramsey discusses Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in particular. See Ramsey, 2011, 7. Ramsey, 2011, 7.

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were too intense, they failed to persuade the audience.61 The morality attributed to the description of the life of common people or soldiers recalls Diderot’s previously discussed denomination of genre painting as ‘moral painting’, thus putting the effect of the sentimental novel or memoir on a synonymous level with genre painting. Both military memoirs and military genre paintings have to be understood in the context of this sentimental culture, which saw in the ‘individual human experience […] the source of knowledge and values’.62

Male companionship and allusions to homoeroticism in military genre paintings Male companionship – the subject of Bellangé’s Les deux amis – was a recurrent theme in the military genre paintings of the 1860s. The focus on male friendship based on reciprocal support and intimacy was rooted in the French army and stems from Napoleon I’s military reforms, as argued by Brian Joseph Martin in his Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy & Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France (2011). Martin argues that the military reforms of Napoleon  and the experiences of the Napoleonic Wars produced a new type of relationship among men, which he terms ‘Napoleonic friendship’. This model is based on intimate links between soldiers resulting from mutual affection and support, which is the outcome of living through life-threatening situations together. He further suggests that the development of Napoleonic friendship in the French army and in nineteenth-century military literature led to an increase in covert homoeroticism and ultimately to explicit homosexuality in the literary texts written about the First World War.63 Looking at the many genre paintings of the 1860s about military friendship, one might argue that the subject acquired a new urgency during this time. This is confirmed by the fact that the first military theory on this subject dates from the same decade.64 Charles Ardant du Picq, an infantry officer during the Crimean War, wrote two inf luential works, Étude du combat d’après l’antique (1868) and the posthumously published Études sur le combat (1880) on the psychological effects of combat and the importance of cohesion among soldiers. Acknowledging that disciplinary training was not enough to overcome fear in combat, Ardant du Picq believed that solidarity among soldiers was more likely to make them fight. He contended that soldiers are more likely to risk their lives for their friends than for abstract notions such as honour or nationhood.

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Ramsey, 2011, 8. Ramsey, 2011, 12. Martin, 2011, 13. Martin, 2011, 7–8.

Male companionship and allusions to homoeroticism in military genre paintings

Fig. 85: François-Germain-Léopold Tabar, Guerre de Crimée, attaque d’avant-poste, 1858, oil on canvas, 47 × 56 cm, Musée national du château de Compiègne.

A type of friendship stronger than death is also the subject of Bellangé’s Les deux amis (Fig. 84). Adeline was later to write about the link between friendship and death in the painting: ‘death, however cruel it may be, has not dared to separate them, and they did their last sigh while squeezing hands; their friendship still lasts beyond the tomb.’65 The subject was treated by several other artists at the Salons of the Second Empire. In François-Germain Tabar’s (1818–1869) painting Guerre de Crimée, attaque d’avant-poste, exhibited in 1859, a couple of soldiers – one dying, the other attending to him – dominate the central foreground (Fig. 85). The drum lying next to the moribund soldier contrasts with the man’s silence and his already white face dropping to his chest. The rest of the regiment can be discerned marching towards the background, their relentless martial step contrasting with the inseparable friendship displayed in the foreground where the soldier remains with his dying comrade even though they are on enemy terrain, as indicated by the title. 65

‘la mort, si cruelle qu’elle soit, n’a pas osé les séparer et ils ont rendu le dernier soupir en se serrant la main, leur amitié dure encore au delà de la tombe,’ Adeline, 1880, 44.

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Fig. 86:  ‘Le dernier adieu, tableau de M. Armand Dumaresq’, Le monde illustré 15, no. 382 (6 August 1864), 92.

Fig. 87:  Horace Vernet, Soldat pleurant sur le champ de Waterloo, c. 1818, pencil and sepia wash on paper, 12.2 × 9.9 cm, Wallace Collection, London.

Similarly, Armand-Dumaresq’s Le dernier adieu of 1864 (not shown at the Salon; Fig. 86) depicts an old zouave kneeling in front of what is presumably his friend’s burial site, indicated by the cross. Turned towards us, the soldier’s sombre face, blank stare and drooping shoulders suggest his silent grief for his friend. The subject has an arthistorical precedent in, for example, Vernet’s drawing for an engraving Soldat pleurant sur le champ de Waterloo of the early 1820s (Fig. 87). Armand-Dumaresq’s depiction, however, achieves a higher degree of emotional immediacy by placing the soldier closer to the picture plane, his body and grieving face turned towards the viewer. In Vernet’s depiction, the open grave displays the lamented friend already reduced to a skeleton, whereas in Armand-Dumaresq’s depiction the traces of hasty burial are still visible in the clumped earth; in the right background, one can discern a group of soldiers burying another comrade, thereby adding to the impression that the friend’s death has been recent, and thus intensifying the emotive nature of the scene. Such 1860s compositions follow a similar formula, displaying the dead or dying friends at the centre of a scene devoid of action. Strikingly, in 1859, when the Italian Campaign was still raging, the military genre paintings by Bellangé, Tabar and Pils had distanced the viewer more from the depicted dying or dead soldiers. In Bellangé’s Le salut d’adieu (1859; Fig. 88), the stretcher on which a zouave officer is borne away is given equal emphasis as the guard of honour, formed by common zouaves paying tribute to

Male companionship and allusions to homoeroticism in military genre paintings

Fig. 88:  Hippolyte Bellangé, Le salut d’adieu; scène de tranchée devant Sébastopol (Guerre de Crimée), 1859, photograph, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

their superior officer. Similarly, in Pils’ Sébastopol (1859; Fig. 89), the dying soldier in the foreground is placed centrally but also accompanied by a priest and a scene of soldiers carrying away a corpse on the right. In contrast, in the 1860s, the emotional rhetoric becomes more confrontational as the suffering soldiers are placed more centrally and, for example, the staple image of dying friends is characterised by a halt in narrative. Although none of the critics alluded to it, the ‘language of the heart’ with which Bellangé illustrated the intimate relationship of the two friends lying close together in Les deux amis could well have been associated at the time with homosexuality (Fig. 84). The intimate relationship between soldiers takes on an explicit homoerotic tone in Gustave Flaubert’s historical novel Salammbô (1862), published only a year after Bellangé’s Les deux amis had captured the hearts of the public at the Salon. Set after the First Punic War (264–241 BC), the novel recounts how Carthage found itself under attack after it had been unable to fulfil promises made to its army of mercenaries. Flaubert could not have described the homoerotic relationship between the soldiers more explicitly: Their community of existence had established deep friendships among these men. Camp, for most of them, replaced country; living without a family, they transferred to a companion their need for affection, and they fell asleep side by

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Fig. 89:  Isidore Pils, Sébastopol, 1859, photograph by Bingham, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

side, under the same cloak, in starlight. Then, in this perpetual wandering through all kinds of countries, murders and adventures, strange loves had grown up; obscene unions as serious as marriages, in which the stronger defended the younger in the midst of battles, helped him over precipices, sponged the sweat of fever from his brow, stole food for him; and the other, a child picked up at some roadside before becoming a Mercenary later, repaid such devotion with countless delicate attentions and wifely favours.66

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‘La communauté de leur existence avait établi entre ces hommes des amitiés profondes. Le camp, pour la plupart, remplaçait la patrie; vivant sans famille, ils reportaient sur un compagnon leurs besoins de tendresse, et l’on s’endormait, côte à côte, sous le même manteau, à la clarté des étoiles. Puis, dans ce vagabondage perpétuel, à travers toutes sortes de pays, de meurtres et d’aventures, il s’était formé d’étranges amours, – unions obscènes aussi ­sérieuses que des mariages, où le plus fort défendait le plus jeune au milieu des batailles, l’aidait à franchir les précipices, épongeait, sur son front, la sueur des fièvres, volait pour lui de la nourriture; et l’autre, enfant ramassé au bord d’une route, puis devenue un Mercenaire, payait ce dévouement par mille soins délicats et des complaisances d’épouse,’ Gustave

Male companionship and allusions to homoeroticism in military genre paintings

The aspects of military relationships – the mutual protection, the substitute for the family, the love between men – that Flaubert touches on in this passage had featured in military fiction throughout the nineteenth century, as Martin shows in his study of Napoleonic friendship. However, this passage from Flaubert’s book, not discussed by Martin, is unprecedentedly explicit.67 The setting of the novel in the distant past may have allowed a more direct transgression of the moral codes of a homophobic contemporary society, but, in truth, the passage could just as well be describing conditions in the army of the Second Empire. Napoleon III was anxious to separate his army from civilian society in order to prevent revolts, and the conscription period was seven years – during which soldiers were not allowed to marry and were frequently rotated from garrison to garrison in order to prevent them from integrating into society.68 Hence Flaubert’s statement that ‘living without a family, they (the soldiers) transferred to a companion their need for affection’ could plausibly be seen as a commentary on contemporary conditions. Salammbô was an immediate popular success and also inf luenced the fine arts production of the 1860s. Apart from numerous portraits of the book’s heroine, Salammbô, both the interest in archaeological detail and the brutality of war found expression at the Salon. In 1865, the critic Alphonse Audeoud noted dismissively that ‘the artists are already only too encouraged to these f lights of fancy by today’s taste, which extols the spicy literature of novels like […] Salammbô’, a comment which gives credence to the impact of Flaubert’s description of soldiers’ possibly homosexual relationships on military genre paintings of the 1860s.69 The intimate embrace of two soldiers in a later painting by Protais (Après le combat, Salon of 1863; Pl. 32), which I will discuss later, further suggests the pervasion of a homoerotic dimension in Protais’ oeuvre. Unlike Flaubert’s evocation of the Carthaginian past, Paul de Molènes’ military novels described the life of contemporary soldiers based on the author’s own experiences. They could not therefore banish the issue of homosexuality to the distant past and instead do not touch on the notion at all. The newspaper Spectateur militaire insisted neutrally on the ‘study of the human heart’ and a focus on the soldiers’ feelings in contemporary military novels.70

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Flaubert, Salammbô (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863), 430–431; translation from Gustave Flaubert, Salammbo (London: Penguin, 1977), 258–259. Martin skips the military literature of the Second Empire and pinpoints the emergence of more overt references to homoeroticism to a much later date, just before the First World War. Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 416. ‘les artistes ne sont que trop encouragés déjà à tous ces écarts par le goût du jour qui prône la littérature épicée des romans dans le genre de […] Salammbô,’ Alph. Audeoud, ‘Salon de 1865’, Revue indépendante no. 23 (15 June 1865), 720. ‘étude profonde du cœur humain’, Antoine Camus, ‘Les écrivains militaires modernes: Alfred de Vigny – Paul de Molènes’, Le Spectateur militaire 47, no. 158 (August 1864), 227.

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The evocation of anti-war sentiments in Protais’ early military genre paintings The ‘study of the human heart’ of the soldier in painting inevitably invited anti-war sentiments. Protais’ La dernière pensée (Salon of 1859; Fig. 81), a close-up view of a dying soldier, could be interpreted as an image critical of warfare. Resting against a rocky elevation in an otherwise undefined terrain, the soldier is awaiting his death. His heavenward gaze and his hands clasped in prayer evoke Christian connotations, casting the soldier, who is bathed in transcendental light, as a Christian martyr and, by extension, a victim of the martial government. The gloominess of the atmosphere evoked by the pale face and drooping posture was praised by most critics for expressing sentiment without slipping into sentimentality.71 Critics knew that Protais had been injured three times during the Crimean War and saw in him, as Duvivier phrased it in the year when La dernière pensée was exhibited, ‘a thinker’ who ‘studies face to face the horror of one of these amputations of humanity’.72 Endowing a soldier with transcendental purpose and thought was considered to derive from literary models. Reviewing Protais’ paintings, Dauban noted: ‘M. Protais seeks to render what one could call the poetic side of military life; he corresponds under certain aspects, in regard to the arts, to what was, in regard to literature, M. de Molènes.’73 The potentially critical message of Protais’ genre paintings becomes explicit in Deux blessés (Salon of 1861; Fig. 90), which was exhibited at the same Salon as Bellangé’s Les deux amis and resembles the latter in title and subject. Two dying soldiers dominate the picture plane. The French soldier is leaning limply against a rocky elevation. His legs are sprawled, his shirt wide open and his face pale, indicating that life is vanishing from his body. With his left hand he offers his f lask to an Austrian soldier – recognisable by his white uniform – who is crawling up towards the Frenchman from a pit on the right in a final effort. The Austrian’s eyes are turned upward so that we can see only the whites of his eyes and not his pupils, suggesting that he is in agony or sending a last devout prayer heavenwards, perhaps thanking God for the unexpected display

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Théophile Gautier fils, ‘Salon de 1863: Avant le combat – après le combat’, Le monde illustré 13, no. 332 (22 August 1863), 127. ‘c’est un penseur. […] il y étudie de visu l’horreur d’une de ces am­­putations de l’humanité,’ J.- H. Duvivier, Salon de 1859: Indiscrétions (Paris: Dentu, 1859), 7. ‘M. Protais cherche à rendre ce qu’on pourrait appeler le côté poétique de la vie militaire; il correspond, sous quelque rapport, dans les arts, à ce qu’était dans la littérature M. de Molènes,’ C.-A. Dauban, Le Salon de 1863 (Paris: Renouard, 1863), 17. Paul de Molènes’ steep military career under the Second Empire suggests that he was not critical of war. See Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, vol. 11 (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1874), s. v. ‘Molènes’. On the Second Empire ideology propagated in Molènes’ novels see Bardon, 1980, 144.

Male companionship and allusions to homoeroticism in military genre paintings

Fig. 90: Alexandre Protais, Deux blessés (souvenir de la campagne d’Italie), 1861, photograph by Goupil, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

of charity. The sun has already set, and soon night will close in on the lonely, dying soldiers. By showing two dying enemies instead of friends, Protais implied that, in the face of death, boundaries between peoples and countries and, by extension, war itself become pointless. Maxime Du Camp recognised the extraordinary humanity as the subject of the painting: ‘For one the battle is lost, for the other it is won; but this matters little, as both will die. […] These are no longer enemies, these are no longer combatants, these are no more than two men; this is what Protais has perfectly understood.’74 As a vehicle for anti-war sentiments, sentimentalism can also be found in military memoirs of the early nineteenth century.75 By personalising war, the descriptions of suffering soldiers became, as Ramsey notes, ‘a mode for ref lecting upon war’.76 He argues that, especially in the early nineteenth century, with its first appearance, the literary genre was seen as oppositional to the glorification of the nation and war.77 By the 1820s this had changed, and the military memoir became part of the commemora74

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‘Pour l’un la bataille est perdue, pour l’autre elle est gagnée; mais cela leur importe peu, car tous deux vont mourir. […] Ce ne sont plus deux ennemis, ce ne sont plus deux combattants, ce ne sont plus que deux hommes; c’est ce que M. Protais a parfaitement compris,’ Du Camp, 1861, 24. On military memoirs as anti-war writing until World War II see Ramsey, 2011, 2ff. Ramsey, 2011, 10. Ramsey, 2011, 14.

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tion of past wars and was as such more widely accepted. Nevertheless, the image of the suffering soldier, which the military memoir and Protais’ genre paintings share, remained ambiguous. A pro-government interpretation would see in the memoirs, especially those by officers, glorious adventure stories. The image of suffering, too, can be interpreted as a worthy commemoration of the soldier as a figure of national importance and thus a memorialisation of the nation’s sacrifices for the well-being of the nation. However, as Ramsey notes, the image of suffering, by revealing the destructive brutality of military conf lict, more often ‘conf licted with the rhetoric of national glory’.78 In particular, when the suffering soldiers depicted were no longer known heroes as they had mostly been in Yvon’s canvases, the reception of the image could more easily tip over into resentment of war. This happened, Ramsey notes, when the reader’s/viewer’s sharing of the soldier’s feelings created an ‘excess of sentiment’.79 The image of the suffering soldier therefore drew a fine line between elevating the soldier as a ‘stoical hero […] of national significance’ and showing him as a ‘misfortunate tool of tyranny’.80 That the Second Empire arts administration was somewhat aware of this ambiguity is suggested by the fact that it did not actively endorse Protais’ more immediate pictorial engagement with suffering, most examples of which seem to have been painted for the private art market.

The image of national sacrifice in Protais’ Le matin and Le soir at the Salon of 1863 Protais’ most popular works, Le matin; avant l’attaque (Pl. 31) and Le soir; après le combat (Pl. 32), restored suffering as an image of national sacrifice. Exhibited at the Salon of 1863, the paintings show a group of soldiers before and after a battle; as a pair they were suggestive of a working day, thus entering the subject-matter realm of everyday life (Protais exhibited a third canvas, Retour de la tranchée en Crimée [Fig. 91], which attracted only faint interest compared to the success of the other two). Hung close to each other (Fig. 92) in the lower register of the central room of the Salon because of their relatively small sizes, and separated only by a portrait of Napoleon III by Flandrin and two smaller canvases f lanking the portrait, the paintings were meant to be viewed as a pair.81 They show the same group of light infantry soldiers, the Chasseurs de Vincennes, once before and once after the battle; in the painting titled Le matin, which hung on the left side, the soldiers dominate the right of the picture, looking ahead of

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Ramsey, 2011, 19. Ramsey, 2011, 18. Ramsey, 2011, 10. The portrait is recognisable in the print of the central Salon. Hippolyte Flandrin, Portrait de S. M. l’Empereur, 1862, oil on canvas, 212 × 147 cm, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

The image of national sacrifice in Protais’ Le matin and Le soir at the Salon of 1863

Fig. 91:  Alexandre Protais, Retour de la tranchée en Crimée, 1863, oil on canvas, 84 × 142 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille.

them towards the left so that we see most of them in profile. Amidst them, their commander is mounted on horseback, signalling with his left hand for the soldiers to remain quiet. The bodily postures and facial expressions of most of the soldiers convey a sense of attentiveness and tension as they wait for the signal to attack. Some are using the last minutes before the attack to adjust their uniforms, load their guns or, as some dreamy facial expressions reveal, let their minds wander to their loved ones at home. Of the Italian terrain we can see only some tufts of grass and the slope of a soft ridge in the background. The diffuse and shimmering light promises a bright day. All of the men are young, as was normal for the specialised light infantry, which depended on agility and initiative: their job was to provide a skirmishing screen ahead of the main body of infantry, harassing and delaying the enemy advance. As was usual in skirmish warfare, the soldiers in the painting are not organised in disciplined ranks but are depicted as a randomly assembled group. In the second painting, entitled Le soir, an exhausted-looking group of chasseurs dominates the left of the painting. Some of them sit on the ground, attending to their wounds, others talk to each other with drooping bodily postures, and two soldiers in the centre embrace each other tenderly. On the right, a dead Austrian soldier lies sprawled on the grass. In the background behind the group of chasseurs, glimpses of Austrian uniforms indicate prisoners taken by the French. Two soldiers in the background, silhouetted against the sky, blow their horns to signal the French victory. The facial expressions are sombre and the whole scene appears silent and gloomy. The pair was a huge success with public and critics alike. The positive reception for the paintings evoked admiration for the soldiers and was thus endorsed by the govern-

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Fig. 92:  ‘Exposition des Beaux-Arts: Vue du Grand Salon carré, tableaux officiels et batailles’, Le monde illustré 12, no. 324 (27 June 1863), 408–409.

ment, this official success being confirmed by the fact that Protais received a Third Class Medal and that Napoleon III might have acquired the pair for his collection.82 Critics welcomed Protais’ conception of the pair. That it excluded the battle itself seemed appropriate at a Salon at which critics felt that the military painter had to be ‘careful’ not to, in Dauban’s words, ‘seem exaggerating to spectators already far away from the events’.83 Auguste Cordier, too, felt relieved that in Le matin ‘the butchery had not yet started’ and that in Le soir ‘one does not see the human bloodbath that took place’.84 Circumventing a depiction of the battle and its violence, the pair of paintings allowed the viewer to focus on its emotional effects instead.85 We only see the battle ref lected in the devastated facial expressions of the soldiers in Le soir, as Théophile Gautier fils observed about the soldiers: ‘If we recognise them it is only just, as their 82

83 84 85

According to Louis Auvray, Exposition des beaux-arts: Salon de 1863 (Paris: A. Lévy Fils et aux bureaux de la Revue artistique, 1863), 25. The last trace we have of the pair is that, according to Drumont, it belonged to a M. Ernest André by 1879. See Édouard Drumont, ‘Alexandre Protais’, in Galerie Contemporaine Littéraire, Artistique. Quatrième Année, Deuxième Semestre (Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 1879). ‘prenez garde de paraître éxagéré à des spectateurs déjà éloignés des événements’, Dauban, 1863, 16. ‘la boucherie n’est pas encore commencée, […] on ne voit pas l’hécatombe humaine qui s’est faite,’ Auguste Cordier, ‘Le Salon de 1863’, La Critique française 5, no. 31 (15 June 1863), 486. Théophile Gautier noted: ‘M. Protais does not consider war from an epic perspective; he studies it under its intimate and sentimental aspect.’ (M. Protais n’envisage pas la guerre du côté épique; il l’étudie sous son aspect intime et sentimental.) Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1863’, Le Moniteur universel no. 143 (23 May 1863), 801.

The image of national sacrifice in Protais’ Le matin and Le soir at the Salon of 1863

Fig. 93:  Jean-François Millet, Un paysan se reposant sur sa houe, 1863, oil on canvas, 80.1 × 90.6 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

physiognomies are not the same anymore; the terrible watershed of battle has transformed them.’86 Like Meissonier’s Solférino, discussed above, Protais’ emphasis on the subjective effects of battle evoked Stendhal’s Waterloo scene in La Chartreuse de Parme, as Claude Vignon noted about Le matin and Le soir.87 By excluding the battle and showing instead the ‘before’ and ‘after’, Protais highlights the notion of the everyday experience of going to and returning from a job. His portrayal of the exhausted-looking Chasseurs de Vincennes breaks with the tradition of showing off the infantry unit’s cult of the bayonet and the furia francesa for which they were celebrated after the Crimean War and the Italian Campaign.88 Protais’ soldiers have to carry out a brutal task that renders them disillusioned and scars their bod86 87

88

‘c’est à peine si nous les reconnaissons, car leur physionomie n’est plus la même; les terribles péripéties de la lutte les ont transformés,’ Gautier fils, 22 August 1863, 127. ‘For me, he (Protais) shows war like, until then, only a few nice pages which have been written in French, have managed to make me understand it: a description of the battle of Waterloo by Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, and Enlèvement de la redoute by Prosper Mérimée.’ (Pour moi, il me montre la guerre comme, jusqu’alors, me l’avaient fait comprendre seulement quelques-unes des plus belles pages qui aient été écrites en français: une description de la bataille de Waterloo par Stendhal, la Chartreuse de Parme et l’Enlèvement de la redoute par Prosper Mérimée.) Claude (Noémi) Vignon (Cadiot), ‘Le Salon de 1863’, Le Correspondant 23 ( June 1863), 375, cited in Nicole Garnier-Pelle, Chantilly: Musée Condé: Peintures des XIXe et XXe siècles (Chantilly: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997), 310. Richard Brooks, Solferino 1859: The Battle for Italy’s Freedom (Oxford: Osprey, 2009), 12.

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ies and souls. Indeed, the critic Lafenestre recognised that Millet and Protais, the two most popular artists at the Salon of 1863, both focused on France and the classes that were exposed to the ‘monotony of brutal work’.89 At the same Salon where Protais showed his pair of paintings, Millet exhibited Un paysan se reposant sur sa houe (Salon of 1863; Fig. 93); the brutish fieldworker monumentalised by Millet, dirty and exhausted by the backbreaking work of turning rocks, frightened the Parisian bourgeoisie, always anxious about potential uprisings among the lower classes.90 Even though Lafenestre ignored this inherent political message and put Protais and Millet in the same category (‘M. Protais likes our soldiers, M. Millet likes our peasants’91), it is obvious that Protais’ exhausted but thoughtful-looking soldiers do not have the same threatening potential as Millet’s peasants. The government recruited soldiers by letting twenty-year-olds draw lots once a year. The unlucky ones who drew a mauvais numéro still had the option of hiring a substitute; this meant that those who were not able to afford the fee comprised the overwhelming majority of the lower ranks of the army.92 A year after the Salon, when Napoleon III first tried to introduce universal conscription, the ensuing debate revealed the social assumptions of the upper classes. A prosecutor in Nancy explained: In general, a labourer, a worker, a peasant has more to gain than to lose from passing six years with a regiment, whereas those who, by the chance of birth or the often excessive sacrifices of their families, have been able to devote themselves to serious and special studies will see their futures entirely shattered by their untimely enrolment in the army.93 One could argue that Protais’ Le soir reinforced the opinion that the peasant had ‘more to gain than to lose’ from recruitment into the army. Indeed, Théophile Gautier fils noted that the solemn expressions on each soldier’s face after the battle demonstrated that ‘he who was in the morning just a recruited peasant comes back as a hero of the battlefield’.94 Millet claimed that he, too, had wanted to express the notion of the strong fieldworker who could serve his country as a soldier. But looking at Millet’s brutalised 89 90 91 92 93 94

‘monotonie d’un travail brutal’, Georges Lafenestre, ‘La Peinture au Salon de 1863’, Revue contemporaine 33 ( June 1863), 598. John House compares Millet’s peasant and its reception to Protais’ soldiers in House, 1992, 94–95. ‘M. Protais aime nos soldats, M. Millet aime nos paysans’, Lafenestre, June 1863, 598. Price, 2001, 416. A prosecutor in Nancy, 14 January 1867, Archives historiques du Ministère de la Guerre, cited in Price, 2001, 423, endnote 108. ‘Tel qui le matin n’était encore qu’un paysan enrégimenté revient héros du champ de bataille,’ Gautier fils, 22 August 1863, 127.

The image of national sacrifice in Protais’ Le matin and Le soir at the Salon of 1863

fieldworker, the critic Chesneau thought it absurd that Millet had really just intended to, as the artist claimed, ‘represent the hardworking country population, the strong popular stock from which our brave, intelligent soldiers are recruited’.95 Indeed, Millet’s crude peasant and Protais’ delicate-featured and brooding soldiers have little in common. Protais’ soldiers do not evoke the notion of the soldat laboureur – the veteran who returns to agricultural tasks in peacetime and the peasant who takes up arms to defend his motherland, combined in one person – popularised by Horace Vernet.96 Rather, contemporaries (with the exception of Théophile Gautier fils, quoted above) thought their implied ref lections on the sense of war imbued them with an air of ‘noblesse’.97 Not even the third painting exhibited by Protais at the Salon, Retour de la tranchée (Fig. 91; not discussed so far), which shows an exhausted group of zouaves dragging themselves through the icy and dark Crimean winter after a shift in the trenches, has any threatening implications. Although they walk towards the picture plane, their introspective postures and hidden faces prevent them from appearing rebellious. Furthermore, none of the soldiers (in Le matin, Le soir or Retour de la tranchée) are pictured on French soil and can thus never have the threatening effect of Millet’s peasant whose towering body is depicted in the French countryside, possibly not far away from Paris. As the soldiers in Le matin and Le soir are not shown in action, the attention is focused on them as thinking individuals rather than as part of an actively fighting collective. Indeed, Du Camp noted dismissively that Protais had exaggerated the soldiers’ independence: The soldier is a collective being; he obeys and does not deliberate; […] an isolated soldier is a man, that is, a being endowed with personal initiative; a troop, be it of an elite, will never be more than a gathering of soldiers, that is, beings who receive their initiative from somewhere else. The Chasseurs d’Orléans of M. Protais are hence, to be absolutely truthful, of a too particular originality; they know all too well to which military and political goal their efforts are assigned.98

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Cited and translated in House, 1992, 94. On the notion and representation of the soldat-laboureur see Nina Maria AthanassoglouKallmyer, ‘Sad Cincinnatus: Le Soldat Laboureur as an Image of the Napoleonic Veteran after the Empire’, Arts Magazine 60, no. 9 (1986), 65–75. See, for example, Bathild Bouniol, ‘L’Amateur au Salon: Critique et causerie’, Revue du monde catholique 6, no. 53 (10 June 1863), 393. ‘L’individualité semble ici accusée à l’excès ; en effet, le soldat est un être collectif, il obéit et ne délibère pas; seul, l’insurgé, le partisan est un être individuel, sachant spécialement pourquoi il se bat, quel droit il défend, quelle cause il attaque; […] un soldat isolé est un homme, c’est-à-dire un être doué d’initiative personnelle; une troupe, fût-elle d’élite, ne sera jamais qu’une réunion de soldats, c’est-à-dire d’êtres qui reçoivent d’autrui leur initiative. Les chasseurs d’Orléans de M. Protais ont donc, pour être absolument vrais, trop d’originalité particulière; ils savent trop quel est le but militaire et politique assigné à leurs

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If Protais’ brooding soldiers shown after the battle or after serving in the trenches seemed implausible, they nevertheless invited the spectators to contemplate the (non)sense of war. The pacifist Dauban endorsed Protais’ approach, praising him for showing how ‘political problems were resolved with the bloodbaths of fathers, husbands, sons and brothers’.99

Linking the army and civilian society? The alleged individuality of the soldiers was welcomed by most critics and, in particular, by the military authorities, who hoped that it would create a closer link between the army and the rest of society and thus support the re-integration of soldiers back into society. This is also one of the subjects of Émile Zola’s novel La Terre (1887), about the French peasantry in the final years of the Second Empire.100 The protagonist of the novel, Jean Macquart, is a veteran of the Battle of Solferino. Although he is the only truly sympathetic character in the novel, he struggles to integrate as a farm worker into the rural community of a small village in La Beauce because the peasantry, which does everything to avoid military service, remains suspicious of this former soldier. The novel ends with Jean’s failure to gain acceptance by the community when it is revealed that even his wife saw him as a foreigner until the end of her life. Indeed, the other characters’ animosity towards Jean is a manifestation of the country’s animosity toward the army in the Second Empire. To show the soldiers’ feelings, the Revue militaire argued, helped to show the public that ‘in reality, the army is not a sanctuary, a caste, a detached fraction of a large whole’; in fact, ‘the army does not have anything unknown, anything strange’ and ‘the army (is) all of us’.101 Discussing the genre of the military novel, this article surprisingly concluded that there should not be a separate genre called the roman militaire as it implied that the army was something separate from the rest of society, the ‘Other’ so to speak. Protais’ paintings did succeed in evoking empathy with the army. The critics felt they could connect with the soldiers and read the men’s minds. Before the combat, Théophile Gautier was sure, one soldier in Le matin was thinking of his parents, another of his beloved wife.102 Like all other art critics, Gautier therefore denied the potentially homo­­

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efforts’. Maxime Du Camp, Les Beaux-Arts à l’Exposition universelle et aux Salons de 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866 et 1867 (Paris: Ve Jules Renouard, 1867), 22–23. ‘les problèmes politiques résolus sur ces hécatombes de pères, d’époux, de fils et de frères’, Dauban, 1863, 18. Émile Zola, La Terre (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1887). ‘En réalité, l’armée n’est pas un sanctuaire, une caste, une fraction détachée du grand tout. […] L’armée n’a rien d’inconnu, rien d’étrange. Encore une fois, l’armée, c’est nous tous,’ Abel George, ‘Le roman militaire’, Revue militaire 1, no. 9 (20 August 1864), 267. Gautier, 23 May 1863, 801.

Linking the army and civilian society?

erotic implications noted above, binding the soldiers to their families rather than to their comrades.103 Despite this normative attempt to create a closer bond between soldiers and civilians, artists rarely went as far as to show soldiers in the midst of civilians, as was the practice in England at the time.104 A rare exception is Auguste Boulard’s painting, Nouvelles de la guerre (Salon 1863; Fig. 94), showing a wounded soldier at a country tavern, surrounded by peasants and children. This contrasted with the reality of the Second Empire’s conscription policy, which isolated soldiers from civilians by forbidding marriage and turning soldiers into professionals through seven years of service.105 In a different way, Protais’ paintings bridged the gap between civilian society and the army by bringing the soldiers closer to the viewer on an emotional level and by the simple fact that they figured prominently in the Salon carré of the Salons. Nevertheless, Protais’ soldiers also represented a certain type, which would ultimately alienate viewers. This type did not, however, correspond to the one proposed by Baudelaire for the depiction of soldiers. In his essay ‘Le peintre de la vie moderne,’ published in three parts in the Figaro in 1863, Baudelaire dedicated one section to the pictorial rendering of the profession of the soldier. In general, Baudelaire argued, each profession had its ‘external beauty’ that needed to be captured by the artist. This external beauty was drawn ‘from the moral laws that govern’ the profession.106 For the soldier this meant that the ‘paternalist organisation’ of the army, as Baudelaire called it, and the kind of life that it dictated was expressed in the facial features of the soldier: The face of the ideal military man must be stamped with a great air of simplicity; for living as they do in a community, like monks and schoolboys, accustomed as they are to unloading the daily concern of living on to a remote, paternalist organisation, soldiers are, in many matters, as simple as children.107

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Paul Mantz sharply noted that Protais’ paintings too obviously aimed to ‘soften the heart of mothers’ (le tableau de M. Protais, si bien conçu d’ailleurs, montre trop l’intention d’attendrir le cœur des mères), Paul Mantz, ‘Le Salon de 1863’, Gazette des beaux-arts 14, no. 6 (1 June 1863), 491. See Joan Winifred Martin Hichberger, Images of the Army: The Military in British Art, 1815– 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Price, 2001, 416. ‘each (profession) draws its external beauty from the moral laws that govern it.’ (chacune tire sa beauté extérieure des lois morales auxquelles elle est soumise.’) Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, in Critique d’art suivi de Critique musicale, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 367. ‘Mais le visage du militaire idéal devra être marqué d’une grande simplicité; car, vivant en commun comme les moines et les écoliers, accoutumés à se décharger des soucis journaliers de la vue sur une paternité abstraite, les soldats sont, en beaucoup de choses, aussi simples que les enfants,’ Baudelaire in Le Peintre de la vie moderne; see Baudelaire, 1992, 368. Translation from Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (London: Penguin, 2010), 34.

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Fig. 94:  Auguste Boulard, Nouvelles de la guerre, 1863, oil on canvas, 71 × 88.5 cm, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire Louis Senlecq, L’Isle-Adam.

Baudelaire’s demand that soldiers’ faces reveal simplicity was not met by Protais. Even though Protais’ soldiers were often labelled as children due to their young age, their air of noblesse did not make them look as naïve as children, as Baudelaire wanted them to appear in paintings. Baudelaire upheld Constantin Guys’ (1802–1892) Crimean War sketches of soldiers as the examples to follow.108 As his sketch Mustering of a Regiment of French Infantry at Dawn (Fig. 95) demonstrates, Guys’ soldiers – hastily sketched and their facial features only alluded to – have little in common with those painted by Protais.109 108

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The artist lived and worked in England and followed the British troops to the Crimea in order to work on site for the Illustrated London News. On Baudelaire’s fascination with Guys’ Crimean War sketches, the rapidity of which he thought best conveyed the heat of battle in which the eyewitness found himself, see Ulrich Keller, ‘Schlachtenbilder, Bilderschlachten – Zur visuellen Kultur des Krimkrieges’, in Der Krimkrieg als erster europäischer Medienkrieg: Kultur und Technik, eds. Georg Maag and Wolfram Pyta, vol. 14 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010), 23–25. The sketch’s first owner was Nadar, who belonged to the circle of friends and collectors of Guys’ oeuvre, which included other illustrious members of the avant-garde such as the Goncourt brothers, Champfleury, Manet and Zola. See Constantin Guys: Crimean War Drawings 1854–1856, ed. Karen Smith, exh. cat., The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: Carpenter Reserve Printing Company, 1978), 9.

Linking the army and civilian society?

Fig. 95: Constantin Guys, Mustering of a Regiment of French Infantry at Dawn, c. 1855, ink wash, and watercolour on paper, 12.3 × 24.7 cm (Galerie André Watteau in 1978, present whereabouts unknown).

According to Baudelaire, Guys’ sketches showed all the inherent features of the subcategories of different types of soldiers: the old infantry officer, the pampered staff officer, the zouave and rif leman, and the artillery.110 In contrast, Protais focused on only one type, the chasseurs de pied. However, being of the nineteenth century, Baudelaire and Protais have in common the fact that they both attempted to divide society into sections and types, believing that each profession had inherent facial features. This was also considered to be true across time, as Claude Vignon wrote: ‘Each time has its types and each type its painter.’ Like Adeline, she observed that Charlet had illustrated the grognard and that Horace Vernet (and, I argue above, Bellangé) had depicted the troupier but added that Protais had created a completely modern type: ‘le soldat moderne’.111 Naturally, Protais’ ‘type’ was as rigidly imagined and as marked by the conditions of the army as the one Baudelaire proposed. Critics’ praise for the individuality of the soldiers in Le matin and Le soir of 1863 seems to have referred exclusively to the soldiers’ suggested capability to have individual thoughts, not to their facial features and variations in types. This becomes clear throughout the 1860s when Protais continuously exhibited the same type of soldier. One could argue that this stylisation impeded the viewer’s sympathy with the soldiers’ 110

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For more on Baudelaire and Guys as the illustrator of modernity see Tom Gretton, ‘Not the Flâneur Again: Reading Magazines and Living the Metropolis around 1880’, in The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, eds. Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), 95–97. ‘Chaque temps a ses types et chaque type son peintre. […] M. Protais peint le soldat moderne,’ Vignon (Cadiot), June 1863, 375.

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suffering in Le soir; it rendered the image of the soldier more abstract – and more distant – than Protais’ earlier depictions of dying and groaning comrades. As types, Protais’ soldiers more easily served the more abstract notion of ‘national aggrandisement’.112

Protais’ Fin de la Halte (1864) and the vulnerable male body At the Salon of 1864, following his success with Le matin and Le soir a year earlier, Protais exhibited La Fin de la Halte (Pl. 33). The painting represents the moment when the sentries wake up a group of foregrounded soldiers who had paused during a march, presumably on enemy terrain. The grass is lush, with a bundle of dandelions and pink f lowers in the foreground. The background is dominated by a soft ridge, which Protais has rendered blue because of the aerial perspective. The rich colours and light suggest a hot summer’s day. Artistically, Fin de la Halte also resembles Protais’ previous paintings. The brushstrokes are relatively invisible, the palette strong. The lush landscape dotted with f lowers reminded critics of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s (1796–1875) landscape paintings. The soldiers are the same as in Protais’ previous paintings: young and dressed as Chasseurs de Vincennes. Edmond About noted about them: If you reproached him (Protais) for exhibiting in 1864 the same troupiers as in ’63 or in ’62, he would reply, not without reason, that the troupiers change little, that they all resemble each other more or less; that the army, like the convent, like the prison, and all institutions outside of nature, is a mould, a waff le iron, where the human models and kneads himself anew in accordance with a uniform type.113 Indeed, in this regard, Protais’ soldiers are not far from being the stylised type Baudelaire thought derived from the dependency on military structure. Despite all the hopes of artistically integrating the army back into society, Protais’ uniform soldiers

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Based on Mary Favret’s distinction between the private and the heroic body, Ramsey discusses Philip Shaw’s observation that the heroic body served national aggrandisement. See Ramsey, 2011, 17, and Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002), 20. Susannah Walker interprets the repetitive image type of Charlet’s veterans as a symptom of trauma, in which the use of visual conventions held the idea of physical suffering in conflict at a distance; see Walker, 2012, 105–129. ‘Si vous lui reprochez d’exposer en 1864 les mêmes troupiers qu’en 63 ou en 62, il vous répondra, non sans raison, que les troupiers changent peu, qu’ils se ressemblent tous plus ou moins; que l’armée, comme le couvent, comme la prison, et toutes les institutions en dehors de la nature, est un moule, un gaufrier, où l’homme se modèle et se pétrit à nouveau sur un type uniforme,’ Edmond About, Salon de 1864 (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie., 1864), 85.

Protais’ Fin de la Halte (1864) and the vulnerable male body

therefore stay within their caste, just as Millet’s peasants, as Thoré observed in 1864, ‘are locked into a caste that does not have the elasticity of the other social classes’.114 Fin de la Halte was similar to the paintings of 1863, not only because it featured the same soldier types but also because it raised the same subjects. Friendship is again evoked; looking at how the soldiers sleep peacefully side by side and gently wake each other up, Théophile Gautier thought that a ‘tender sentiment of cordiality’ pervaded the painting.115 Once again, critics felt they could read the soldiers’ minds, imagining that their thoughts were wandering back home to their loved ones.116 How the experience awaiting those soldiers, once they continued marching, would alter those young faces intrigued critics just as it had in Le matin. Gautier noted: ‘One is interested in these decent young people, so cheerful, so alert, so courageous, who get up to march towards the unknown, to glory, or maybe to death!’117 That the painting may have had an antiwar message, the soldiers representing Christian martyrs, was again noted.118 Indeed, the monumentalising device of letting the soldiers’ bodies take up half of the 123 by 200 centimeter canvas moves the sleeping soldiers closer to the viewer, who could assume the position of a potential enemy, thus rendering the soldiers vulnerable. One could argue that, in this composition, more than in those of the previous paintings, Protais’ debt to Géricault becomes apparent.119 As in an 1818 study sheet from one of Gericault’s sketchbooks, today in the collection of the Courtauld Gallery (Fig. 96), the sleeping soldiers are elevated on a rocky terrain so that the spectator can see their faces fully.120 As Norman Bryson demonstrates in his essay ‘Géricault and “Masculinity”’ (1994), the crisis of militarism brought about by Napoleon  I’s waning empire was formative for Géricault’s passive soldiers.121 Bryson notes that, after the French Revolu114

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‘sont enfermés dans une caste qui n’a pas l’élasticité des autres classes sociales’, Théophile Thoré, ‘Salon de 1864’, in Salons de W. Bürger 1861 à 1868, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie de Ve. Jules Renouard, 1870), 31. ‘un doux sentiment de cordialité, Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1864’, Le Moniteur universel no. 205 (23 July 1864), 971. See for example Parent, 15 May 1864, 191. ‘On s’intéresse à ces braves jeunes gens si gais, si alertes, si courageux, qui se lèvent pour marcher à l’inconnu, à la gloire, à la mort peut-être!’ Gautier, 23 July 1864, 971. About, 1864, 83. Clothilde Alexandrovitch notes Géricault’s oeuvre as one of Protais’ artistic sources; see ‘Crimée, témoignages d’artistes’, Nouveaux Cahiers du Second Empire no. 6 (2006), 34. It is unlikely that Protais knew this particular sketch as it was in the collection of Théodore Sauvé during Protais’ lifetime. See Colin Bailey, ‘Théodore Géricault: Sheet of Figure Studies, c. 1817–18’, in Master Drawings from the Courtauld Gallery, eds. Stephanie Buck and Colin Bailey, exh. cat., Courtauld Gallery, London (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2012), 217–220. Norman Bryson, ‘Géricault and “Masculinity”’, in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, eds. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), 236.

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Fig. 96: Théodore Géricault, Sheet of figure studies, 1817–1818, pen and ink on paper, 21.3 × 33.7 cm, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

tion, when soldiers were no longer an elite group but were recruited from all levels of society, the head of state/the king ceased to represent the state. Instead, France was figured in the male body more generally, which meant that, in order to glorify the state, the male body had to be glorified: ‘The body is no longer leased to the state; it is the state […] and the body’s destiny of glory or defeat is that of the nation as a whole.’122 Consequently, depicting wounded soldiers after Napoleon I’s defeat meant visualising the disintegration of this body image and embodying the state’s mutilation.123 This is exemplified in Géricault’s Cuirassier blessé (Salon of 1814), whose wounded condition is expressed by his facial expression, and it is taken to extremes in Géricault’s Le radeau de la Méduse (Salon of 1819) where the naked men have been stripped of all indications of heroism and signs of rank.124 Protais’ depictions of passive soldiers can be linked to similar historical currents. Protais’ Fin de la Halte indicates a similar renunciation of the glorified body. The sleeping bodies are a far cry from the furia francese revealed in the figures of Yvon’s officially commissioned battle paintings. Just as Géricault’s emaciated

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Bryson, 1994, 247. Bryson, 1994, 248. Bryson, 1994, 240, 256. Théodore Géricault, Cuirassier blessé quittant le feu, 1814, oil on canvas, 358 × 294 cm and Le Radeau de la Méduse, 1819, oil on canvas, 491 × 716 cm, both Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Protais’ Fin de la Halte (1864) and the vulnerable male body

figures can be interpreted as indirect visualisations of a post-Empire malaise, Protais’ suffering or sleeping soldiers might indicate a weariness over Napoleon III’s increasingly senseless military endeavours. The reception for Fin de la Halte was not as enthusiastic as that for Le matin and Le soir at the previous Salon, but it was still favourable. Only the Revue militaire, taking the scene too literally in its military sense, ranted: ‘A battalion of chasseurs has halted in a meadow, why? Are they on the march for the combat? For a stopover? Are they on a campaign? Are they in France? All that is impossible to define.’125 The Salon of 1864 was generally perceived as a ‘Salon of peace’ due to the small number of military paintings.126 Auvray was amused to see the disappointment on the faces of those hordes of visitors (generously estimated at twenty thousand on the first public day) who had queued and paid to see glory and death commemorated in battle paintings only to find there were almost none.127 The critic Parent suggested that Protais, who in the 1860s did not exhibit any battles and depicted soldiers thinking rather than fighting, could become the official painter of the army in peacetime: If the Empire is ever in peace, as everything makes one hope, M. Protais will surely become the emperor’s painter. He represents the thought of the army, and not at all its combats. He is the philosopher of the f lag. His soldiers never fight; they think.128 Indeed, the presence of Protais’ exhausted-looking soldiers at the Salons coincided with a time when the French were most anxious to avoid involvement in the various conf licts taking place across the European continent. During both the Polish insurrection against the Russian Empire (1863–1865) and the Danish War against Prussia (1864), French opinion was unanimous in demanding peaceful policies.129 Despite the continued glorification of Napoleon I and his campaigns, Frenchmen in the 1860s saw

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‘Un bataillon de chasseurs s’est arrêté dans une prairie, pourquoi? Est-il en marche pour le combat? Pour l’étape? Est-il en campagne? Est-il en France? Tout cela est impossible à définir,’ Norley, ‘Salon militaire. Lettres sur l’exposition de 1864’, Revue militaire 1, no. 3 (20 May 1864), 93. ‘Peace reigns throughout at the Salon.’ (La paix règne sur toute la ligne au Salon.) Gueullette, 1864, 25. Louis Auvray, Exposition des beaux-arts: Salon de 1864 (Paris: Lévy fils, aux bureaux de la Revue artistique, 1864), 12. ‘Si l’Empire est à jamais la paix, comme tout le fait espérer, M. Protais deviendra assurément le peintre de l’Empereur. Il représente la pensée de l’armée, et non point ses combats. Il est le philosophe du drapeau. Ses soldats ne se battent jamais, ils songent,’ Parent, 15 May 1864, 191. Lynn Marshall Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 189.

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military service as a burden. When the government was forced to reduce the number of conscripts in 1865, the French public applauded.130

Protais’ assimilation of previous criticism in Les vainqueurs (1865) At the next Salon, of 1865, Protais captured this fatigue of war effectively in Les vainqueurs (Fig. 97), in which all the themes explored in his previous military genre paintings came together. As in previous years, Protais’ painting hung prominently in the Salon carré.131 The composition of Les vainqueurs is divided into two distinct parts. On the left side, the victors referred to in the title march towards the spectators, rif les shouldered. Their dirty faces look exhausted and they seem to be lost in thought, staring blankly ahead of them, with drooping heads. The first row of the regiment is cut off by the left picture margin; we see only four soldiers next to one another. The soldier closest to the centre carries a ragged standard bearing the Second Empire’s eagle across his right soldier. The faces of the following two or three rows are also still distinguishable, but the mass of soldiers behind them is only vaguely rendered, partly because they are disappearing in the dust that dominates the scene and partly because of the perspective. On the right side of the composition, a crowd of soldiers cheerfully waves their hats, blowing horns and cheering for the victors on the left. Their uniforms look impeccable, contrasting with the torn ones of the victors, and their postures are erect and energetic. As they look towards the group on the left, who are approaching frontally, all the cheering soldiers on the right are shown to us in profile. The two groups are connected by an exhausted-looking ‘victor’, a higher-ranking zouave in the painting’s centre, who marches beside the larger group of soldiers returning from battle. Depicting the return from a day of combat, Les vainqueurs conjures up the notion of the end of the working day once more. Again, similar themes dominated the genre paintings showing peasants at the same Salon: Jules-Adolphe Breton (1827–1906) exhibited La fin de la journée, showing peasant women resting on their hoes and leaning against each other, sleeping, after an exhausting day’s work in the fields.132 Millet’s and Breton’s dedication to, as Lafenestre had called it in 1864, the ‘eternal heroism of the countryside and of work’ was mirrored by Protais’ soldiers returning from a day spent serving their country.133 Edmond About praised the depicted soldiers: ‘Here are the 130 131 132 133

Gordon Wright, ‘Public Opinion and Conscription in France, 1866–70’, The Journal of Modern History 14, no. 1 (March 1942), 27. Théophile Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger 1861 à 1868, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie de Ve. Jules Renouard, 1879), 180. Present whereabouts and dimensions unknown. An engraving of Breton’s painting can be found in: Magasin Pittoresque 34 ( January 1899), 37. Georges Lafenestre, ‘La Peinture et la Sculpture au Salon de 1864’, Revue contemporaine 39 (May and June 1864), 355.

Protais’ assimilation of previous criticism in Les vainqueurs (1865)

Fig. 97: Alexandre Protais, Les vainqueurs; retour au camp, 1865, photograph by Goupil, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

men who have not wasted their day; they have done their duty.’134 In both the genre paintings dedicated to soldiers and those commemorating peasants, the emphasis is on the human side of the work that sustains France. While Breton idealised peasants, Millet and Protais showed the hardships of the work, affecting body and soul. About noted of Protais’ Vainqueurs: ‘The victors are not just machines perfected for the destruction of fellow human beings.’135 The main message of the painting, however, lies in the formal opposition between the exhausted victors and their cheering comrades. It is striking how none of the victors is paying attention to the euphoric welcome; they are looking straight ahead towards us, and not one of them turns his head to his left. They are, contemporaries imagined, thinking of the friends they had left behind on the battlefield.136 The noise suggested by the horns and the open mouths of their comrades shouting in triumph contrasts with 134 135 136

‘Voilà des hommes qui n’ont pas perdu leur journée; ils ont fait leur devoir,’ Edmond About, ‘Salon de 1865’, Le Petit Journal no. 845 (25 May 1865), 3. ‘Mais les vainqueurs ne sont pas seulement des machines perfectionnées pour la destruction du prochain,’ About, 25 May 1865, 3. ‘They (the soldiers) have been counted after the battle, and more than one comrade, friend, brother did not respond to the roll call, or could only respond with a scream of pain or a deadly moan.’ (Ils se sont comptés après la bataille, et plus d’un camarade, d’un ami, d’un frère n’a pas répondu à l’appel, ou n’a pu y répondre que par un cri de douleur ou un gémis-

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Fig. 98: Cham, ‘M. Protais Le Retour des vainqueurs’, in: Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Promenades au Salon, par Cham’, Le Charivari (18 May 1865), 408–409.

the implied silence of the group on the left.137 Indeed, exaggerating this contrast in a caricature (Fig. 98), Cham’s caption wonders: ‘If the victors make faces like that! What faces do the losers make then?’138 In fact, La vie parisienne commented that the contrast showed the cheering soldiers in an unfavourable light. The caption below a caricature, which also exaggerates the contrast between the groups, reads: ‘Side of the good children – side of the ugly villains […]. M. Protais […] has shown us the young military school, spoiled and pampered, the existence of which we would not have known. Thank you!’139 In comparison with the blooming health of the group on the right, the victors appear weak and ill. Again, critics noted a difference in physiognomy in that the soldiers’ faces appeared to have been changed by the terrible experiences of combat. Hector de Callias called the victors ‘living phantoms of the carnage’, who were surprised

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sement funèbre.) Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1865’, Le Moniteur universel no. 206 (25 July 1865), 1061. Critics noted how quiet and absent-minded the victors seemed, considering the noise of the cheering crowd; see Alfred Nettement, ‘Salon de 1865’, La Semaine des familles no. 35 (27 May 1865), 553. ‘Si les vainqueurs font ces têtes-la! Quelles têtes font donc les vainqueurs?’ Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Promenades au Salon, par Cham’, Le Charivari (18 May 1865). ‘Côté des enfants bien sages. – Côté des gros vilains laids […]. M. Protais […] nous a révélé une jeune école militaire pimpante et bichonnée, dont nous ignorions complètement l’existence. Merci!’ Anonymous, ‘Dernier coup d’œil au Salon’, La vie parisienne (10 June 1865), 317.

Protais’ assimilation of previous criticism in Les vainqueurs (1865)

Fig. 99: Auguste Raffet, Le drapeau du 17e léger, 13 septembre 1841, lithograph, 37 × 26.8 cm, Inv. E.588-1905, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

that ‘the wing of death had f lapped so close to (their) faces’.140 Contemporaries thought they looked as haggard as sick people.141 In comparison to Retour de la tranchée (Salon of 1863; Fig. 91), which shows a similar group returning to camp, it becomes clear that, here, Protais intended to confront the spectators increasingly with the suffering of the soldiers. In the composition of 1863, the group of soldiers also look miserable, but they are not walking straight towards the viewer (instead more towards the right) and remain further away from the picture plane. The artistic rhetoric of Les vainqueurs of 1865 is confrontational; the soldiers are placed closer to the picture plane and their worn-out faces are more visible. Compared to an earlier identical composition by Raffet, Le drapeau du 17ème Léger (1841; Fig. 99), from which Protais may have directly borrowed, it becomes clear how radical Protais’ image of the Second Empire has become: in Raffet’s composition, the soldier in the front row proudly holds up the intact pole with Napo-

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‘L’aile de la mort a battu si près du visage des soldats que la vie les étonne; ce sont les fantômes vivants du champ de carnage’. Hector de Callias, ‘Un Mot sur la grande peinture au Salon’, L’Artiste 1 (15 June 1865), 271. See for example Alex. Hemmel, ‘Salon de 1865’, Revue nationale et étrangère 21, no. 73 (10 May 1865), 138.

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leon I’s eagle. The soldiers are arranged in the same way, also cut off by the left picture margin, and their footstep is the same; however, these soldiers look proud and healthy, whereas in Protais’ painting they are slowly dragging themselves towards the picture plane, the pole carrying Napoleon III’s ragged eagle lying heavily on the bearer’s shoulder. It seems surprising that a painting depicting the Second Empire’s army as exhausted was allowed to hang in the central room of the Salon of 1865. One might argue that, in a climate characterised by a general process of liberation, during which controls over the press were relaxed, there were fewer taboo subjects.142 Considering that in Les vainqueurs Protais repeated elements that had been received favourably at previous Salons – the everydayness of war, the weariness and comradeship that soldiers experienced, the before-after contrast, and, at a formal level, the engaging rhetoric – one can assert that the artist considered critical reactions when devising this painting. Working more with public criticism than with the government’s possible expectations, Protais employed pictorial strategies that ref lected the critics’ political opinions, namely their anti-war sentiments. Art critics had become increasingly political in their rejection of military paintings, and the themes Protais conjured up in Les vainqueurs endorsed the critics’ opinions about the unnecessary human suffering caused by war. As Napoleon  III’s opportunist populist politics bent whichever way the wind blew, Protais’ pictorial nod towards art criticism might well have been unproblematic for the arts administration. As discussed above, the military authorities approved of literature and fine art that focused on soldiers’ feelings, as it created a link to society. In addition, the veil of sentimentality perhaps rendered the paintings less realistic, thus weakening their potentially insurgent impact. Alfred Nettement reported that, standing in front of Protais’ Les vainqueurs in 1865, he had heard several people say that the painting was ‘good, but it is always the same thing’.143 The question remains as to whether Les vainqueurs was critical of the government’s foreign policies. Théophile Thoré thought that, because Protais’ painting did not indicate which war the soldiers were fighting, viewers would be reminded that, in reality, France, despite its ostensibly martial character, had recently been avoiding military conf lict, even where it was needed: ‘The Vainqueurs, by M. Protais, turns into a pamphlet against war. Victors over whom, for what, and for whom? For the King of Prussia or for Archduke Maximilian?’144 Although the critic seems to be implying that Protais is sitting on the fence, the fact that the soldiers are anonymous and the purpose of their combat remains unclear from the painting does indeed heighten the sense of

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Press law of 2 July 1861. See Price, 2001, 177. ‘C’est bien, mais c’est toujours la même chose,’ Nettement, 27 May 1865, 552. ‘les Vainqueurs, par M. Protais, tourne au pamphlet contre la guerre. Vainqueurs de qui, pour quoi, et pour qui? pour le roi de Prusse ou pour l’archiduc Maximilien?’ Thoré, 1870, vol. 2, 180.

Tipping over into sentimentalism: Protais’ Le soldat blessé (1866)

the pointlessness of war, the painting therefore turning into a critique of the martial government. In the same review, Thoré noted that Protais had succeeded in showing the banality of glory and compared his rendering of the disillusioned soldiers to Meissonier’s Campagne de France of the year before (Pl. 30). Thoré concluded by pointing out how paradoxical it was that Protais’ depiction of disillusioned soldiers hung in the official room of the Salon and that the Salon catalogue indicated that the painting belonged to the ministre de l’Intérieur: ‘The melancholic Vainqueurs belong to M. le comte W. de Lavalette: would that be the minister of the interior who is demanding peace?’145 Although ironic, this comment directed against the government official who collected Protais’ exhausted soldiers suggests that Protais’ Les vainqueurs negotiated the tensions between official ideologies and previous critical responses. Indeed, the painting’s extreme division in composition – with the exhausted soldiers on the left and the combative soldiers on the right – could be said to ref lect Protais’ split allegiances.

Tipping over into sentimentalism: Protais’ Le soldat blessé (1866) The trend of producing increasingly enfeebled soldiers in Protais’ oeuvre found a climax at the Salon of 1866 with Le soldat blessé (Fig. 100).146 The soldier referred to in the title is depicted lying in a ditch overgrown with lush green grass and copious bushes. His body lies horizontally to the picture plane and takes up almost its entire length. The soldier’s head rests on the ditch on the left, turned towards the viewer. His sprawling legs and arms and dangling head suggest his weakened state. The viewpoint is most striking: the viewer is constructed as being with the soldier in the trench, its rim reaching all the way to the upper border of the painting so that we can only see a little piece of the sky. The viewpoint and prominent placement of the soldier might have resulted in an intense experience of the soldier’s suffering had it not been for the depiction of nature’s fertile lushness. Only Gautier made a point of arguing that the contrast between the blossoming and ‘playful innocence’ of nature and the dying man rendered his death even crueller. Like Erckmann-Chatrian in their novels, Gautier argued, Protais showed the ‘tender and melancholic’ sides of war.147 However, most critics could not take this feeble and victimised soldier lying on a bed of f lowers seriously. With increasing calls for peace in the second half of the 1860s, Protais’ genre paintings started to come under attack. Recognising that Protais had been seminal in 145 146

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‘Les Vainqueurs mélancoliques appartiennent à M. le comte W. de Lavalette: serait-ce le ministre de l’intérieur, qui demande la paix?’ Thoré, 1870, 181. The painting was acquired by the arts administration for 3,000 francs after the Salon. The last trace we have of it is that a M. Pierquin acquired it at the sale of Empress Eugénie’s collection on 21 April 1881, lot 79. See Granger, 2005, 612. The painting is visible in a black and white photograph of the Salon of 1861. The colours are known from detailed descriptions by art critics. Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1866’, Le Moniteur universel no. 202 (21 July 1866), 943.

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Fig. 100:  Alexandre Protais, Soldat blessé, 1866, detail of photograph of paintings acquired by the Administration des Beaux-Arts at the Salon of 1866, Archives nationales F21/7637 dossier 16 (present whereabouts and dimensions of original painting unknown).

creating a new artistic genre, Edmond About in 1865 nevertheless expressed doubts about the value of the exclusive focus on individual soldiers: ‘I am just wondering whether we have done good in aggrandising the figures to this point in paintings of the martial genre.’ He questioned whether painters should not in fact have simply remained in the ‘modest proportion of the Bellangés and little Horace Vernets of the old days?’148 The critic welcomed the fact that, at the Salon of 1865, Bellangé seemed to have returned to tradition by showing a classical battle scene, Les cuirassiers à Waterloo (Fig. 101), in which dozens of tiny figures – called ‘tin soldiers’ by contemporaries – on horseback are depicted racing towards the right picture plane.149 Bellangé’s ‘tin soldiers’ marked a 148

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‘Je me demande seulement si nous avons bien fait d’agrandir à ce point les figures dans les tableaux de genre guerrier. Ne vaudrait-il pas mieux rester dans la proportion modeste des Bellangé et des petits Horace Vernet du bon temps? M. Bellangé est resté fidèle à la tradition, lui, et il ne me semble pas que son talent ait décru,’ About, 25 May 1865, 3. These are the same kind of stock figures that About had mocked in 1857 as tin soldiers. See Edmond About, Nos artistes au Salon de 1857 (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie., 1858),

Tipping over into sentimentalism: Protais’ Le soldat blessé (1866)

Fig. 101:  Hippolyte Bellangé, Les cuirassiers à Waterloo, passage du chemin creux, 1865, oil on canvas, 105 × 215 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.

retreat from the previously desired intimate genre in military painting. The event depicted was not from the recent past, and the artist had not used a historical source. Instead, he claimed as his source the epic Waterloo passage from Victor Hugo’s recently published Les Misérables (1862), large parts of which were reprinted in the Salon catalogue.150 While Stendhal had focused in La Chartreuse de Parme on fragments of the battle, Hugo, as Martin notes, ‘mythologises the battle in colossal proportions’.151 Similarly, Bellangé visualised the battle as an epic whole in which verisimilitude is swallowed up and becomes irrelevant.

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347. Most critics praised Bellangé’s painting. Alex. Hemmel wrote: ‘Les Cuirassiers à Waterloo by M. Bellangé, have given me, I think for the first time, a real idea of a battle.’ (Les Cuirassiers à Waterloo, de M. Bellangé, m’ont donné, je crois, pour la première fois, l’idée vraie d’une bataille.) Alex. Hemmel, ‘Salon de 1865’, Revue nationale et étrangère 21, no. 74 (10 June 1865), 299. At the same Salon, critics welcomed a similar return to tradition, the epic composition of ferocious horses in Adolphe Schreyer’s painting Charge de l’artillerie de la garde impériale, à Traktir en Crimée, le 16 août 1855, 1865, oil on canvas, 206 × 435 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Explication des ouvrages de peinture … exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1er mai 1864 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, imprimeurs des musées impériaux, 1864), 18; Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, vol. 5 (Paris: Pagnerre, 1862). Part of the author’s mythologising was to attribute Napoleon I’s defeat to divine intervention, suggesting God had sent rain to confound the emperor’s artillery. See Martin, 2011, 131. One should, however, bear in mind, as Rachel Sloan has kindly pointed out to me, that the battle, despite its colossal proportions, ends up being significant to the novel because of the actions of one small and thoroughly unheroic figure (Thénardier).

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Despite their different approaches – the epic battle versus the intimate genre episode – Bellangé and Protais both draw upon literature as the basis for their military paintings. While Protais’ use of literature was not explicit in that he did not indicate particular passages as direct sources, he too drew on literature more than on reality, spurning press reports and historical accounts. As a sale of Protais’ library after his death revealed, Protais owned books that suggested the artist understood history, like most of his contemporaries, in terms of everyday life in the past and through the filter of historical novels by authors such as Sir Walter Scott.152 The literary basis of the military genre paintings of the 1860s stands in contrast to Yvon’s machines of military glory that were based on the official reports of battle printed in the Moniteur. At the beginning of this chapter, I referred to the Waterloo scene of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme as, in it, the author presented the battle through the focus of one individual. The individual’s viewpoint was also the focus of Bellangé’s ‘genre of tears’ and Protais’ poetic soldiers. The portrayal of one man’s experience seemed more convincingly realistic to contemporaries than the overview of grand battles. Charles Yriarte summarised Protais’ artistic achievement for military painting in 1863: He is not, in the strict sense, a battle painter; he prefers the episode, the veritable allurement of that human and barbaric turmoil, which one calls war. It is (in the episode) that man reveals himself underneath the soldier, nature is here caught red-handed, the probability of death returns all sentiments to their correct expression, and the manifestation which is made is stripped of all artifice and all exaggeration.153 However, by 1866, Protais had gone too far with the evocation of empathy, and his paintings were seen to be transgressing into the realm of sentimentality. Castagnary proved correct when he pointed out that there was a danger in following Paul de Molènes’ novels, which ‘mixed parfum de rose with the smell of cavalry boots’.154 As a consequence, he warned Protais that ‘he should distrust sentimentalism like romance. 152

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Included in the sale were, for example, the complete works of Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Adolphe Thiers’ Histoire de la Révolution française and a book about the complete œuvre of Ernest Meissonier. See Catalogue des livres modernes composant la bibliothèque de feu M. Alexandre Protais, artiste, peintre, officier de la Légion d’Honneur, auction cat., Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 21–22 March 1890 (Paris: A. Durel, 1890). ‘Ce n’est pas, à proprement parler, un peintre de batailles; il affectionne l’épisode, l’attrait véritable de cette mêlée humaine et barbare qu’on appelle la guerre. C’est là que l’homme se révèle sous le soldat, la nature y est prise sur le fait, la probabilité de la mort ramène tous les sentiments à leur juste expression, et la manifestation qui se fait est dépouillée de tout artifice et de toute exagération,’ Charles Yriarte, ‘Exposition des Beaux-Arts: Avant le combat – Après le combat. Deux tableaux par M. A. Protais’, Le Monde illustré 13, no. 332 (22 August 1863), 126. ‘mêler le parfum des roses à l’odeur des bottes de cavalerie’, Castagnary, 1861, 14.

Tipping over into sentimentalism: Protais’ Le soldat blessé (1866)

Fig. 102: ‘M. Protais’, in: Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Promenade au Salon, par Cham’, Le Charivari (10 May 1866).

Until this day, he has stayed within the exact limits of his art; but one step further will take him outside, that is, into the wrong and the bad’.155 Indeed, the exaggerated focus on sentiment, the overuse of the ‘parfum de rose’, seemed paradoxically to have resulted in a loss of actual feeling. The caption of Cham’s caricature (Fig. 102) of Le soldat blessé, shown as embedded in an exaggeratedly lush and blossoming nature, read: ‘Soldier overcome by the smell of flowers. We hope that he was not part of the brigade of General Rose.’156 Military genre paintings of the 1860s, by showing the ‘poetic side of battle’, were inherently but subtly critical of warfare and therefore stand in diametrical opposition to the officially commissioned epic battle paintings of the 1850s and early 1860s. Admittedly, Protais himself seems to have been apolitical; affirming à-la-mode sentiment was the main goal of his military genre paintings. Les vainqueurs, which visually synthesised previous commentary, suggests that the artist was concerned primarily with his career and with art-historical questions. However, as the previous discussion has attempted to demonstrate, Protais was precariously operating on the border of art-historical acceptability, and his paintings risked transgressing the boundary with excessive sentimentalism. Intentionally or not, the reception of Protais’ emaciated soldiers was 155

156

‘Qu’il se défie donc du sentimentalisme comme de la romance. Jusqu’à ce jour, il est resté dans les limites exactes de son art; mais un pas de plus le mettrait en dehors, c’est-à-dire dans le faux et le mauvais,’ Castagnary, 1861, 14. ‘Soldat incommodé par l’odeur des fleurs. Espérons qu’il ne fait pas partie de la brigade du général Rose,’ Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Promenade au Salon, par Cham’, Le Charivari (10 May 1866).

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political as they became a mode for ref lecting upon war. This was fuelled by the fact that the themes emanating from the paintings were socially topical, such as fraternal homoeroticism, which brought to the fore the notion of the army as substitute family. For a brief moment, the cultural problem of the gap between the army and society was bridged in Protais’ paintings, where the defence of the motherland presented as an everyday task became a vehicle for identification with civilian working life. The visualisation of sentiments effectively invited spectators to share the soldiers’ feelings and their suffering. The paintings lost these political implications when the language of sentimentalism ceased to engage viewers.

Conclusion

The Universal Exhibition of 1867, the second and last world fair hosted by the Second Empire three years before its demise, allows us to make conclusive observations about the characteristics and status of Second Empire military painting.1 All the ‘big hits’ of military paintings from the past Salons were reunited in the fine arts section of the Universal Exhibition: Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff (Salon of 1857; Pl. 24), Bellangé’s Les deux amis (Salon of 1861; Fig. 84), Pils’ Bataille de l’Alma (Salon of 1861; Fig. 47), Protais’ Le matin; avant l’attaque and Le soir; après le combat (Salon of 1863; Pl. 31, Pl. 32) and Meissonier’s L’Empereur à Solférino (Salon of 1864; Pl. 29), among others, hung in the centre of the large elliptically structured temporary building on the Champs de Mars. Meanwhile, in the Palais des Champs-Elysées, new paintings were being exhibited at that year’s Salon: apart from two official renderings by Beaucé and de Neuville of battles in Mexico, only a few military genre paintings were on show, together with First Empire subjects that had run like a common Bonapartist thread through all the Second Empire Salons. In the same year, Langlois’ panorama on the Champs-Elysées of the Battle of Solferino continued to draw in the masses.2 The prominence of military paintings at the Universal Exhibition in 1867 highlighted what had previously been only suggested by the failure of the government’s attempts to centre-stage this genre at the Salons and in Versailles during the 1860s:

1

2

Already at the time, there was a sense that the concurrence of the Universal Exhibition and the Salon allowed for a general evaluation of the status of the fine arts under the Second Empire. Théodore Duret wrote that this situation ‘allows a general judgement about them (the paintings) to be pronounced and to characterise them in their principal traits.’ (permet de porter sur eux un jugement d’ensemble et de les caractériser dans leurs traits principaux.) Théodore Duret, Les peintres français en 1867 (Paris: E. Dentu, 1867), 2. The Panorama de la prise de Solférino was open from 1865 until 1872 on the Champs-Elysées. It was more successful than the panorama of the Battle of Sébastopol, with 500,850 visitors in the first four years according to Langlois. See Jean-Charles Langlois (1789–1870): Le spectacle de l’histoire, eds. Caroline Joubert and François Robichon, exh. cat., Musée des BeauxArts de Caen (Paris: Somogy, 2005), 164.

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military paintings could no longer convince either the critics or the sensation-seeking crowds of Paris. This was particularly evident when compared with reactions to the first Universal Exhibition only twelve years earlier, when Horace Vernet’s retrospective exhibition had given lustre to the genre. Most critics writing in 1867 drew comparisons between the two Universal Exhibitions, noting that the main difference was the absence in the latter exhibition of major figures representing the supremacy of France’s fine arts, among them Vernet and Ingres, who had recently died. Marius Chaumelin wrote: The Universal Exhibition is far from offering, in regard to the arts, the immense interest that it presented in 1855 […] this supremacy […] is no longer as overwhelming as it had seemed to be in 1855, when we could oppose to Europe Ingres, Delacroix, Decamps, Horace Vernet […]. But is there anyone (today) who could claim to succeed to the heritage of the illustrious dead wohm we just mentioned?3 In the 1850s, critics had wagered that Yvon and Pils would become the ‘new Horace Vernets’, in terms of fame and popular appeal. And while the success of Yvon’s Prise de la tour de Malakoff did indeed equal that of Vernet’s Smala and the Salon of 1857 in general boasted numerous military paintings in a climate of renewed militarism after the Crimean War, the 1860s showed that the appeal of military paintings did not endure. Théodore Duret, who dedicated an entire chapter of his book on the Universal Exhibition to this ‘art officiel’, outlined the careers of the Second Empire’s military artists. He noted that Yvon, after his Prise had already replaced the pictorial expression of emotions by grimaces, descended even further with his Bataille de Solférino (Pl. 28), which, as we have seen, was a grandiose failure at the Salon of 1861 and was not, tellingly, exhibited again at the Universal Exhibition. Bellangé had met a similar fate after his ‘success of tears’ with the pictorial rendering of sentiment in Les deux amis at the Salon of 1861, which was followed at the Salon of 1863 by Une revue sous l’Empire, remarkable, in Duret’s words, for its lack of life.4 The critic went on to observe that Pils, too, after his ingenious Bataille de l’Alma was now represented at the Universal Exhibition of 1867 by Une Fête donnée à l’Empereur (destroyed but two sketches survive), a painting that 3

4

‘L’Exposition universelle de 1867 est loin d’offrir, sous le rapport de l’art, l’immense intérêt qu’a présenté celle de 1855 […] cette suprématie […] n’est plus aussi écrasante qu’elle semblait l’être en 1855, quand nous pouvions opposer à l’Europe Ingres, Delacroix, Decamps, Horace Vernet […]. Mais en est-il un seul qui puisse prétendre à recueillir l’héritage des morts illustres que nous venons de citer?’ Marius Chaumelin, L’art contemporain: La Peinture à l’Exposition universelle de 1867, Salons de 1868, 1869, 1870, Envois de Rome, Concours, etc. (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1873), 1–2. Hippolyte Bellangé, Une revue sous l’Empire, 1863, dimensions and present whereabout unknown.

Conclusion

was, according to Peter Benson Miller’s estimations, fifteen to twenty metres long and showed a reception of natives organised in the honour of Napoleon III’s visit to Algeria.5 Duret, in the vein of most critics in 1867, judged this latter painting by an artist who had been one of the most promising talents of the Second Empire as the ‘complete archetype of the horrors that official painting can engender’.6 Analysis of the Second Empire’s military paintings reveals that the genre enjoyed a final heyday in the 1850s, when its pictorial rhetoric still seemed able to transmit the propagandist messages desired by the commissioners. The year of 1857, when Yvon’s Prise was exhibited, encapsulated a moment when the audience’s desire to be entertained and the state’s demand for seeming historical accuracy could still be reconciled: the Russian figure apparently falling out of Yvon’s canvas fascinated the crowds while at the same time it communicated France’s superiority. In the 1860s, France’s military strength could not be communicated so directly, in a general climate of anti-war sentiment and scepticism towards the Second Empire’s foreign policies. The image of the warrior became more personalised with an emphasis on feeling, as in Protais’ paintings that appealed to the Salon visitors but threatened to be critical of the government’s military policy. Against this background, Yvon’s centre-staging of the emperor in Bataille de Solférino and his recapitulation of a heroic struggle in Magenta (Fig. 74) seemed outdated. The increasing gap between the public’s tastes and the demands of commissioners left artists trapped between the two, and led them to produce strangely staged propaganda pieces. In 1867, the retrospective evaluation of French military painting placed at its pinnacle Horace Vernet and Ernest Meissonier, previously the most critically debated figures of the art world, as they alone, it was judged, had been able to capture the ‘national character’ of the French soldier.7 Artistic and social, as well as political, factors were responsible for the diminishing presence and waning popularity of military paintings. From 1864, several military events polarised political opinion against the emperor, which partly explains the sheer absence of military paintings at the Salons, as noted by critics. The first event was the victory of the United States warship Kearsage over the Confederate States warship Alabama off the French harbour of Cherbourg on 19 June 1864. This extension of the American Civil War to the shores of France polarised political opinion against Napoleon  III who had supported the American South. The next dramatic event was the Prussians’ victory over the Austrians at Sadowa on 3 July 1866, which destroyed the European balance of power overnight and which, as Lynn Case observes, ‘eventually

5

6 7

Peter Benson Miller, ‘La vision officielle de l’Algérie sous le règne de Napoléon III’, in De Delacroix à Renoir: l’Algérie des Peintres, exh. cat. Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2003), 160. One sketch forms part of the Kenneth Jay Lane collection in New York, the other of the collection of the Musée national du château de Compiègne. ‘un type complet des horreurs où peut conduire la peinture officielle’, Duret, 1867, 150. Duret, 1867, 163.

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Conclusion

reduced France to a second rate power and led directly to her disaster in 1870’.8 The next traumatic event was the execution by Mexican republican forces in June 1867, while the Universal Exhibition was still in progress, of Emperor Maximilian, installed by Napoleon III on the throne of his puppet regime. While this event would lead to the Second Empire’s collapse two years later, the political situation in Mexico had already brought the government bad press. In these last years of the Second Empire, not having realised that Sadowa was a warning shot, French public opinion continued to resist Napoleon III’s military reforms, which had initially proposed shorter periods of military service and the conscription of a much larger proportion of society. But the rural population in particular preferred the existing system, which allowed most young men to avoid military service through the drawing of lots. Even republicans rejected Napoleon  III’s reforms, insisting that, as Roger Price notes, ‘in a romantic mystification of the revolutionary past […], in case of war, young men would accept their patriotic duty and save the nation, as in 1792, through the levée en masse’.9 Two and a half years after the passage of a weak and ineffective army law, Prussia took advantage of the country’s military unpreparedness, invading France on 19 July 1870. The changed attitudes towards war had found expression in Jules Verne’s 1865 novel De la terre à la lune (1868), in which the author painted a horrifying scenario of the future of war technologies: ‘Engines of war attained colossal proportions, and projectiles f lew beyond their proper limits, much to the detriment of inoffensive spectators’; this passage can be read retrospectively as a shuddering foreboding of Prussia’s destructive war technology that would eviscerate the French army. But in 1865, rather than warning of France’s lack of preparedness as did those who favoured the army laws proposed by Napoleon III, Verne seemed intent on brushing off these fears and mocking the warmongers with his black humour: … the sole preoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity from motives of philanthropy, and the perfecting of firearms considered as instruments of civilisation: an assembly of exterminating angels, otherwise the best fellows in the world.10

  8   9 10

Lynn Marshall Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 209. Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 423–424. ‘Les engins de guerre prirent des proportions colossales, et les projectiles allèrent, au-delà des limites permises, couper en deux les promeneurs inoffensifs. […] l’unique préoccupation de cette société savante fut la destruction de l’humanité dans un but philanthropique, et le perfectionnement des armes de guerre, considérées comme instruments de civilisation. C’était une réunion d’Anges Exterminateurs, au demeurant, les meilleurs fils du monde.’

Conclusion

Fig. 103:  Édouard Armand-Dumaresq, Chacun son tour, engraved by M. Baude, Le monde illustré 53, no. 1376 (11 August 1883), 92.

In the political climate of the latter half of the 1860s, it is not surprising that military paintings were not present at the Salons in as great numbers as they had been after the victorious campaigns of the Crimea and Italy. The artistic climate had also changed. In 1867, critics no longer tried to argue against the rise of genre painting but accepted its predominance over other genres in a resigned tone. Maxime Du Camp noted: ‘Grand painting disappears. It seems no longer appropriate for our rapid and artificial way of life; it is replaced by genre.’11 Acknowledging this trend, de Neuville’s painting of the Mexican combat of San Lorenzo (Salon of 1867) attempts to show a genre scene on a large format, but it failed to convince the critics.12 However, as we have seen, Protais’

11

12

Jules Verne, De la terre à la lune (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1868), 3–4; translation from Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon & Around the Moon (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2011), 6–7. ‘La grande peinture s’en va, elle semble ne plus appartenir à nos mœurs rapides et factices; elle est remplacé par le genre.’ Maxime Du Camp, Les Beaux-Arts à l’Exposition universelle et aux Salons de 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866 et 1867 (Paris: Ve Jules Renouard, 1867), 247–248. Alphone de Neuville, Combat de San Lorenzo (Expédition du Mexique), 1867, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, Hellenic Army Academy, Athens. For an account on the critical reception of the painting, see See François Robichon, Alphonse de Neuville, 1835–1885 (Paris: N. Chaudun: Ministère de la défense, 2010), 44–48.

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genre scenes of suffering soldiers likewise started to seem too sentimental. The pictorial celebration of the zouave for his furia francese and his cult of the bayonet after the Crimean War and the Italian Campaign was replaced by the depiction of his suffering and feelings in Protais’ genre paintings. Finally, Armand-Dumaresq’s 1883 print of a zouave would be a poignant image of retirement – it shows the soldier relaxing in a plush bourgeois living room, legs up and with the iconic zouave fez discarded on an elegant table (Fig. 103) – were it not for the Franco-Prussian war, which heralded a new chapter in military painting. Painters such as de Neuville and Jean Detaille (1848– 1912) would drive the thirst for engaged spectatorship even further in their realistic renderings of war.13 From today’s perspective, it is exactly this preoccupation with historical accuracy in the military paintings of the Second Empire that makes these works seem so rooted in their time and artistically unappealing. In the declining years of that Empire, Édouard Manet’s paintings of the clash of the Alabama and the Kearsange as well as the execution of Maximilian, which he painted while the Universal Exhibition of 1867 was still open and which was suppressed by Napoleon III’s regime, use for the first time a provocative visual language to express the inconvenient reality of historical events (Fig. 104).14 Manet’s aesthetic and political challenge, however, needs to be seen in the context of the official military paintings analysed in this book. The two approaches to painting inf luenced each other: Manet directly borrowed one of the figures in Protais’ Le matin; avant l’attaque (Pl. 31), which was on display at the Universal Exhibition while Manet was painting his L’Exécution de Maximilien. The pose, clothes and facial expression of the veteran in the foreground of Protais’ canvas are the same as that of the French soldier calmly loading his rif le in Manet’s painting.15 The figure therefore migrated from Protais’ canvas – which had been purchased by Napoleon III – to Manet’s, where he appears as an unemotional witness to the shooting of Napoleon  III’s ally. Manet is thus working against the sentimentality of Protais’ military genre paintings, introducing a visualisation of a military event which is not blurred by censorship. Although the painters themselves envisioned audiences across generations, the commissioners of the official paintings of the Second Empire aimed for these works to have an immediate impact on public opinion before their appeal ‘expired’, as is suggested by the disassembling of the Salle de Crimée at the beginning of the twentieth century and by the sheer inaccessibility of the paintings today. Napoleon III had intended 13 14

15

Robichon, 2010. Édouard Manet, Combat du Kearsarge et de l’Alabama, 1864, oil on canvas, 134 × 127 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. On the political implications of Combat du Kearsarge et de l’Alabama, and L’Exécution de Maximilien, see Manet: The Execution of Maximilian – Painting, Politics and Censorship, ed. Juliet Wilson-Bareau, exh. cat., National Gallery, London (London: National Gallery Publications, 1992). As observed in Albert Boime, Art in the Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871, vol. 4, A Social History of Modern Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 725.

Conclusion

Fig. 104:  Édouard Manet, L’Exécution de Maximilien, 1867–1868, oil on canvas, 252 × 302 cm, Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim.

them to illustrate the military glory of his regime in times of long-lasting peace, which he thought the Universal Exhibition would represent as it united the countries of the world under the banner of ‘conciliation and peace’, as emphasised in his speech at the Award Ceremony on 1 July 1867: ‘The Universal Exhibition of 1867 will mark, I hope, a new era of harmony and progress.’16 In 1884, however, Pils’ biographer Victor Fournel noted that, despite the artists’ paintings, Sevastopol had already been forgotten by the time of Pils’ death in September 1875, several years after the Franco-Prussian war: ‘The painter of Alma and Une tranchée devant Sébastopol was buried on 8 September 1875; it was on 8 September 1855 that Sevastopol was taken by assault. But who, after all, remembered this? Nobody… We have other anniversaries to celebrate now. How can one think of Sevastopol in the month of Sedan?’17

16

17

‘conciliation et de paix […] l’Exposition de 1867 marquera, je l’espère, une nouvelle ère d’harmonie et de progrès.’ Napoleon III, Discours, messages, et proclamations de S. M. Napoléon III empereur des français: 1849–1860 (Paris: Mirecourt, Humbert, 1860), 2–4. ‘Le peintre de l’Alma et d’Une tranchée devant Sébastopol a été enterré le 8 septembre 1875; c’est le 8 septembre 1855 que Sébastopol fut enlevé d’assaut. Qui donc s’en est souvenu? Personne… Nous avons d’autres anniversaires à célébrer maintenant. Comment songer à Sébastopol dans le mois de Sédan?’ Victor Fournel, Les artistes français contemporains: Peintres – sculpteurs (Tours: A. Mame et fils, 1884), 298.

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Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 16, Fig. 24, Fig. 29, Fig. 30, Fig. 35, Fig. 53, Fig. 56, Fig. 60, Fig. 82, Fig. 83, Fig.  88, Fig.  89, Fig.  90, Fig.  97, Fig.  105, Fig.  106: Bibliothèque nationale de France; Fig.  3, Fig. 34: Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, eds. Katie Hornstein and Daniel Harkett (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2017), Pl. 1; cover plate; Fig. 4, Fig. 31, Fig. 61, Fig. 62, Fig. 70, Fig. 79: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Michel Urtado; Fig. 5: Horace Vernet 1789–1863, exh. cat., Académie de France à Rome and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Rome: De Luca, 1980), 62; Fig. 6: Musée cantonal des BeauxArts de Lausanne; Fig. 7, Fig. 39, Fig. 40, Fig. 43, Fig. 63, Pl. 24: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Franck Raux; Fig. 8, Fig. 15, Fig. 20, Fig. 23, Fig. 33, Fig. 43, Fig. 44, Fig. 45, Pl. 4, Pl. 5, Pl. 6, Pl. 7, Pl. 8, Pl. 9, Pl. 12, Pl. 13, Pl. 14, Pl. 16, Pl. 17, Pl. 18, Pl. 19, Pl. 20, Pl. 21, Pl. 25 and book cover (detail), Pl. 26: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Gérard Blot; Fig. 9, Fig. 10, Fig. 17, Fig. 25, Fig. 42, Fig. 47, Pl. 28: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais; Fig. 11: Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Promenade à l’exposition, par Cham’, Le Charivari (14 June 1855); Fig. 12: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Daniel Arnaudet / Gérard Blot; Fig. 13, Fig. 32: bpk / RMN – Hervé Lewandowski; Fig. 14: Chantal Georgel, Une icône républicaine: Rouget et Lisle chantant “La Marseillaise” par Isidore Pils, 1849, exh. cat., Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989), 4; Pl. 1: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Gérard Blot / Hervé Lewandowski; Pl. 2, Pl. 23: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen / Martine Seyve; Pl. 3: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Jean-Marc Manaï; Pl. 10: Letter from Eudore Soulié to Alfred-Émilien Comte de Nieuwerkerke, 28 September 1859, V2 (1855–1870), Archives des musées nationaux, Paris; Pl. 15: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Hubert Josse; Pl. 22: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Daniel Arnaudet / Jean Schormans; Pl. 27: Mairie de Bordeaux / F. Deval; Pl. 29: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Jean Hutin; Pl. 30, Fig. 85: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Stéphane Maréchalle; Pl. 31, Pl. 32: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Harry Bréjat; Pl. 33: Musée des Augustins, Toulouse / Daniel Martin; Pl.  44: Courtesy of Sebastian Ballauf; Fig.  18, Fig.  21, Fig. 28: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Fanny Reynaud; Fig. 19: Alexandre Protais, ‘Prise du Mamelon Vert’, L’Illustration 25, no. 644 (30 June 1855); Fig. 22: Baron de Bazancourt, L’expédition de Crimée jusqu’à la prise de Sébastopol: Chronique de la guerre d’Orient, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie d’Amyot, 1857), 208; Fig. 26: author’s archive; Fig. 27: Henri Durand-Brager, ‘Correspondance de Crimée’, L’Illustration 24, no. 62 (13 January 1855), 24–25; Fig. 36, Fig. 49, Fig. 91: Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts / Photos Chipault / Soligny; Fig. 37: Musée Rolin, Ville d’Autun / S. Probst; Fig. 38: Dulong A., ‘Le caporal Lihaut’, L’Illustration 30, no. 751 (18 July 1857), 48; Fig. 41: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / image RMN-GP; Fig. 46: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Christophe Fouin; Fig. 48: Sotheby’s sale catalogue, Monaco, 15 June 1990, lot 130; Fig. 50: Christie’s sale catalogue, Monaco, 30 June 1995, lot 158; Fig. 51: Galletti, Salon de 1861: Album caricatural (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, A. Bourdilliat et Cie., 1861); Fig. 52: bpk / Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN – Grand Palais / Tony

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Image Credits Querrec; Fig. 54: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Pascal Segrette; Fig. 55: V. P., ‘Correspondance de Crimée’, L’Illustration 25, no. 642 (16 June 1855), 376; Fig. 57: Bibliothèque de Rouen; Fig. 58, Fig. 59, Fig. 64: Napoléon III et l’Italie: Naissance d’une Nation. 1848–1870, exh. cat., Musée de l’Armée, Paris (Paris: Éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2011), 188, 139, 191, 50, 81, 239, 215; Fig. 65: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Daniel Arnaudet; Fig. 66: The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; Fig. 67, Fig. 71, Fig. 72, Fig. 73: Pierre Ambroise Richebourg, Hall des sculptures et cimaises du Salon de 1861. Photographies par Richebourg, 1861; Fig. 68: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Droits réservés; Fig. 69: Armand-Dumaresqu file, Musée d’Orsay Documentation; Fig.  74: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Robert Jefferson Bingham; Fig. 75: Illustrated London News (2 July 1859); Fig. 76: Sotheby’s sale catalogue, New York, 29 February 1984, lot 61; Fig. 77: Le monde illustré 10 (1 March 1862), 129; Fig. 78: Copyright The Frick Collection; Fig. 80: Saint Louis Art Museum, Funds given by Mr. and Mrs. R. Crosby Kemper through the Crosby Kemper Foundations 74:1989; Fig.  81: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Limoges (don de la Société des Amis des arts de Limoges en 1863); Fig. 84: RMN – Grand Palais / Goupil & Co; Fig. 86: Le monde illustré 15, no. 382 (6 August 1864), 92; Fig. 87: John Ingamells, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Pictures: French Nineteenth Century, vol. 2 (London: Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 1986), 286; Fig. 92: Le monde illustré 12, no. 324 (27 June 1863), 408–409; Fig. 93: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Fig. 94: Musée d’art et d’histoire Louis-Senlecq; Fig. 95: Constantin Guys: Crimean War Drawings 1854–1856, ed. Karen Smith, exh. cat. The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: Carpenter Reserve Printing Company, 1978), 24; Fig. 96: The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London; Fig. 98: Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Promenades au Salon, par Cham’, Le Charivari (18 May 1865); Fig. 99: Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Fig. 100: Archives nationales F21/7637, Paris; Fig. 101: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / A. Danvers; Fig. 102: Cham (Amédée de Noé), ‘Promenade au Salon, par Cham’, Le Charivari (10 May 1866); Fig. 103: Le monde illustré 53 (11 August 1883), 92; Fig. 104: bpk / Alinari Archives / Alinari.