Painting by Horace Vernet
The Battle of Montmirail is an 1822 history painting by the French artist Horace Vernet.[1][2] It depicts the 1814 Battle of Montmirail during the Napoleonic Wars. It was one of four battle scenes Vernet painted on a commission by the Duke of Orleans, a cousin of Louis XVIII and himself a future monarch of France. Vernet received a total of thirty eight thousand francs for the four works.[3] It depicts the Battle Montmirail, one of the final victories of the French emperor Napoleon. Fought on 11 February 1814 during the Six Days' Campaign, Napoleon's success there ultimately didn't prevent the fall of Paris and his abdication two months later.
When two of his works were rejected for the Salon, Vernet pulled all but one of his paintings from the exhibition including this one. Instead, he chose to include it in his private exhibition of his works in his own studios. However, two years later it was finally exhibited at the Salon of 1824 to acclaim. The author Stendhal hailed it as "Horace Vernet's masterpiece" and praised it for its romanticism.[4] Today it is in the collection of the National Gallery in London.[3]
References
Bibliography
- Harkett, Daniel & Hornstein, Katie (ed.) Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture. Dartmouth College Press, 2017.
- Hornstein, Katie. Picturing War in France, 1792–1856. Yale University Press, 2018.
- Thoma, Julia. The Final Spectacle: Military Painting under the Second Empire, 1855-1867. Walter de Gruyter, 2019.
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