The French Campaign 1814 Meissonier
by Weston Westmoreland
Title
The French Campaign 1814 Meissonier
Artist
Weston Westmoreland
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Campagne de France, 1814. Ernest Meissonier, 1864.
Ernest Meissonier is famous for his military paintings, and he soon attracted a following fascinated by his care for detail and the realism of his uniforms.
1814, the French Campaign, singlehandedly revolutionised the genre of war painting. For there he concentrates not on the action and the fighting but rather on the figures depicted and the emotion. By illustrating the Emperor retreating towards Soissons after the defeat at the battle of Laon (9/10 March) in a modestly sized painting, Meissonier underlines the dramatic intensity of this episode in the French Campaign. The traditional representation of an army on the move – here on the diagonal of the painting – is totally transformed and given a personal and human profundity. The figure of Emperor (whose imminent fall is almost palpable) literally merges into those of his men, from his General Staff (Ney, Berthier and Flahaut at the front, with Ney, Drouot and Gourgaud behind on his left) to the last, almost imperceptible soldier in the long line which stretches out towards the horizon and the vanishing point of the painting. The colours are those of a muddy thaw, matched by the low and threatening sky, all combining to give an atmosphere of heaviness. The audience’s viewpoint then becomes that of the historian with an a-posteriori viewpoint. Meissonier, as a man of the 1860s, shows us a demoralised army on a slippery mud-spattered path, and we know that the French Campaign cannot have a positive outcome.
Painted for the fiftieth anniversary of the battle it commemorates, this work was immediately exhibited at the Salon of French artists in 1864. It was so successful that it was then put on show at the Great Exhibition in Paris in 1867. That same year, Ernest Meissonier, officer of the Légion d’Honneur since 1856, was promoted to ‘commandeur’ of the Légion d’Honneur.
The fame of 1814, the French Campaign was so immediate that the painting was bought just after the Great Exhibition in 1867. It finally ended up in the collection Alfred Chauchard, a great French art collector from the end of the 19th century. Chauchard was one of the first “friends of the Louvre”, amongst other wealthy figures of the Third Republic, and when he died, he left many works to the national museum, including this famous Meissonier painting, which is now on show at the Musée d’Orsay.
The French Campaign, 1814 —in a small format rather unusual for a painter of military history—shows Meissonier's nimble, polished style. Despite its smallness, the vast expanse of desolate plain and leaden sky give breadth to the scene as does the dilated perspective around the central figure of the Emperor magnified by a slightly low angle.
The least details are minutely recorded: The veins on the horse's legs, the snow dirtied by the marching troops... Meissonier was said to "paint grandly in a small size". The artist applied the same meticulous approach, but as a historian this time, to his preparatory research: he collected abundant documentation, questioned many eyewitnesses and tried unsuccessfully to borrow the Emperor's grey coat.
Meissonier's approach was part of the historical realism movement which invaded painting and sculpture under the Second Empire. The episode he has chosen, although it occurred after several victories, announces forthcoming defeats. There is no action or event, just an atmosphere of loneliness and despondency. The doubts and resignation felt by the officers and the troops are palpable and are opposed to the determination that emanates from the isolated figure of Napoleon. These feelings are accentuated by the color range: the whole scene uses brown and grey tones, subdued, deadened registers. The protagonists are not trampling virgin snow, but muddy ground.
Campaign of France, 1814 is the first painting of an unfinished cycle of Napoleon's conquests.
More amazing paintings one copy-paste away at my gallery at https://weston-westmoreland.pixels.com/collections/paintings
Weston Westmoreland
Uploaded
December 21st, 2022
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