Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet, The Battle of Montmirail

Painted in 1822, this was the second of the four battle scenes commissioned by the duc d‘Orléans. Vernet was paid 10,000 francs for the picture – 2,000 francs more than he had received for The Battle of Jemappes painted the previous year.

Following his defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, Napoleon and his army were forced to retreat to France (another painting from the group, The Battle of Hanau, records one of his military victories during that retreat). This picture shows one of Napoleon’s last military successes on French soil before his initial fall from power. On 11 February 1814 he defeated two allied forces – the Russians and the Prussians – at Montmirail, around 100 kilometres west of Paris.

We see French troops charging the Russian forces, which flee the field. On the left, scenes of hand-to-hand combat near a cross supporting a crown of thorns contrast with the relative calm on the right, where soldiers wait to advance. Vernet doesn’t shirk from showing soldiers being wounded or lying dead in the foreground. Instead of showing the entire battle, he emphasises the vanishing points formed by the rows of troops, which structure the composition and lead our eye to the distant horizon below which the sun is sinking. Streaks of pale yellow and pink paint hint at the weakest of sunsets just before twilight descends.

Vernet’s dramatic use of lighting was very likely influenced by new forms of visual spectacle which emerged in the early nineteenth century, particularly panoramas and dioramas. In panoramas enormous paintings were displayed in rotundas completely surrounding the viewer. In dioramas paintings were shown with spectacular light effects within a rotating cylindrical auditorium. These large-scale immersive visual formats presented a challenge to history painting as they provided viewers with an interactive experience of historical events. Vernet’s panoramic battle scenes, with their rich detail, visual drama and intense illusionism similarly sought to transport the viewer to the event itself.

When shown at the Salon of 1824, crowds pressed forward to view the painting, in part drawn in by its wealth of authentic detail. The writer Stendhal declared it a masterpiece of Romanticism: ‘I have seen two or three thousand battles in paintings; I have even seen two or three in real life, and that is enough for me to announce a masterpiece, that of M. Horace Vernet.’ In particular, Stendhal praised the way the painting offered an image of recent history and contemporary French heroism which people could readily understand and collectively share as a nation. He observed, ‘What is romantic in painting is the Battle of Montmirail … The romantic in all the arts is the one who represents the men of today, and not those of heroic times so distant from us, and who probably never existed.’ Declared ’the painter of national emotions' for The Battle of Jemappes, Vernet was now also a youthful symbol of anti-academic romantic rebellion. By 1824, aged only 35, he had become France’s most popular painter.

Stendhal’s focus on current history and not the heroism of a distant, even mythical, past was echoed in an essay on Vernet written in 1863 by Henri Delaborde, who also captured the bittersweet mood of the picture: ‘everything has a solemn melancholy, an expression of sinister grandeur in keeping with the historical meaning of the scene. It is the image of another victory, but a victory without a feast, a glory without drunkenness, a triumph without a future.’