The trivial realism of his workmanship is as tedious as the unreal heroism of his soldiers. In the manner in which he conceived the trooper, Vernet stands between the Classicists and the moderns. He did not paint ancient warriors, but French soldiers: he knew them as a corporal knows his men, and by this respect for prescribed regulation he was prevented from turning them into Romans. But though he disregarded Classicism, in outward appearance, he did not drop the heroic tone. He always saw the soldier as the bold defender of his country, the warrior performing daring deeds, as in the “Battle of Alexander”; and in this way he gave his pictures their unpleasant air of bluster. For neither modern tactics nor modern cannon admit of the prominence of the individual as it is to be seen in Vernet’s pictures. The soldier of the nineteenth century is no longer a warrior, but the unit in a multitude; he does what he is ordered, and for that he has no need of the spirit of an ancient hero; he kills or is killed, without seeing his enemy or being seen himself. The course of a battle advances, move by move, according to mathematical calculation. It is therefore false to represent soldiers in heroic attitudes, or even to suggest deeds of heroism on the part of those in command. In giving his orders and directing a battle a general has to behave pretty much as he does at home at his writing-table. And he is never in the battle, as he is represented by Horace Vernet; on the contrary, he remains at a considerable distance off. Therefore, even with the dimensions of which Vernet availed himself, the exact portrait of a modern battle is exclusively an affair for panorama, but never for the flat surface of a picture. A picture must confine itself, either to the field-marshal directing the battle from a distance upon a hill in the midst of his staff, or else to little pictorial episodes in the individual life of the soldier. The gradual development from unreal battle-pieces to simple episodic paintings can be followed step by step in the following works.

RAFFET.1807.

What was painted for the Versailles Museum in connection with deeds of arms in the Crimean War and the Italian campaign kept more or less to the blustering official style of Horace Vernet. In the galleries of Versailles the battles of Wagram, Loano, and Altenkirche (1837-39), and an episode from the retreat from Russia (1851), represent the work of Hippolyte Bellangé. These are huge lithochromes which have been very carefully executed. Adolphe Yvon, who is responsible for “The Taking of Malakoff,” “The Battle of Magenta,” and “The Battle of Solferino,” is a more tedious painter, and remained during his whole life a pupil of Delaroche; he laid chief stress on finished and rounded composition, and gave his soldiers no more appearance of life than could be forced into the accepted academic convention. The fame of Isidor Pils, who immortalised the disembarkation of the French troops in the Crimea, the battle of Alma, and the reception of Arab chiefs by Napoleon III, has paled with equal rapidity. He could paint soldiers, but not battles, and, like Yvon, he was too precise in the composition of his works. In consequence they have as laboured an effect in arrangement as they have in colour. He was completely wanting in sureness and spontaneity. It is only his water-colours that hold one’s attention; and this they do at any rate by their unaffected actuality, and in spite of their dull and heavy colour. Alexandre Protais verged more on the sentimental. He loved soldiers, and therefore had the less toleration for war, which swept the handsome young fellows away. Two pendants, “The Morning before the Attack” and “The Evening after the Battle,” founded his reputation in 1863. The first showed a group of riflemen waiting in excitement for the first bullets of the enemy; the second represented the same men in the evening delighted with their victory, but at the same time—and here you have the note of Protais—mournful over the loss of their comrades. “The Prisoners” and “The Parting” of 1872 owed their success to the same lachrymose and melodramatic sensibility.

Cassell & Co.
RAFFET.POLISH INFANTRY.
RAFFET.THE MIDNIGHT REVIEW.
C’est la grande revue A l’heure de minuit
Qu’aux Champs-Elysées Tient César décédé.

A couple of mere lithographists, soldiers’ sons, in whom a repining for the Napoleonic legend still found its echo, were the first great military painters of modern France. “Charlet and Raffet,” wrote Bürger-Thoré in his Salon of 1845, “are the two artists who best understand the representation of that almost vanished type, the trooper of the Empire; and after Gros they will assuredly endure as the principal historians of that warlike era.”

Charlet, the painter of the old bear Napoleon I, might almost be called the Béranger of painting. The “little Corporal,” the “great Emperor” appears and reappears in his pictures and drawings without intermission; his work is an epic in pencil of the grey coat and the little hat. From his youth he employed himself with military studies, which were furthered in Gros’ studio, which he entered in 1817. The Græco-Roman ideal did not exist for him, and he was indifferent to beauty of form. His was one of those natures which have a natural turn for actual fact; he had a power for characterisation, and in his many water-colours and lithographs he was merely concerned with the proper expression of his ideas. How it came that Delacroix had so great a respect for him was nevertheless explained when his “Episode in the Retreat from Russia,” in the World Exhibition of 1889, emerged from the obscurity of the Lyons Museum; it is perhaps his best and most important picture. When it appeared in the Salon of 1836, Alfred de Musset wrote that it was “not an episode but a complete poem”; he went on to say that the artist had painted “the despair in the wilderness,” and that, with its gloomy heaven and disconsolate horizon, the picture gave the impression of infinite disaster. After fifty years it had lost none of its value. Since the reappearance of this picture it has been recognised that Charlet was not merely the specialist of old grey heads with their noses reddened with brandy, the Molière of barracks and canteens, but that he understood all the tragical sublimity of war, from which Horace Vernet merely produced trivial anecdotes.

Mag. of Art.
ERNEST MEISSONIER.

Beside him stands his pupil Raffet, the special painter of the grande armée. He mastered the brilliant figure of Napoleon; he followed it from Ajaccio to St. Helena, and never left it until he had said everything that was to be said about it. He showed the “little Corsican” as the general of the Italian campaign, ghastly pale and consumed with ambition; the Bonaparte of the Pyramids and of Cairo; the Emperor Napoleon on the parade-ground reviewing his Grenadiers; the triumphal hero of 1807 with the Cuirassiers dashing past, brandishing their sabres with a hurrah; the Titan of Beresina riding slowly over the waste of snow, and, in the very midst of disaster, spying a new star of fortune; the war-god of 1813, the great hypnotiser greeted even by the dying with a cry of “Long life to the Emperor”; the adventurer of 1814, riding at the head of shattered troops over a barren wilderness; the vanquished hero of 1815, who, in the midst of his last square, in the thick of his beloved battalions, calls fickle fate once more into the lists; and the captive lion who, from the bridge of the ship, casts a last look on the coast of France as it fades in the mist. He has called the Emperor from the grave, as a ghostly power, to hold a midnight review of the grande armée. And with love and passion and enthusiasm he has followed the instrument of these victories, the French soldiers, the swordsmen of seven years’ service, through bivouac and battle, on the march and on parade, as patrols and outposts. The ragged and shoeless troops of the Empire are portrayed in his plates, with a touch of real sublimity, in defeat and in victory. The empty inflated expression of martial enthusiasm has been avoided by him; everything is true and earnest.