Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
A campaign year in the title
The title does two things at once. It names a sitter and it names a year, 1814, which is not the year the picture was made: the catalogue gives 1862 as the date of creation. A title of that kind announces a retrospective subject, a moment reconstructed rather than observed, and it fixes the horse's job as a campaign mount rather than a parade one.
What the record holds
The location is the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The dimensions are 32.4 x 24.2 cm, far below the scale of the state portraits catalogued here. Academicism is the recorded style, French the recorded nationality, and the measured colour family of the image is yellow. The work is filed under male portraiture, Animal Art > Horse and a cultural heritage heading.
Scale and function
Size is one of the few things a record states plainly, and for a mounted subject it matters. A large canvas addresses a room; a picture at this size addresses a person standing close to it. The convention of the elevated rider was designed for the first situation. Used at the second, it stops displaying rank and starts describing a campaign.
Sources
3 references- Meissonier, Jean Louis Ernest — Getty ULAN
French painter, printmaker, and sculptor, 1815-1891
- Ernest Meissonier — Wikipedia
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (French: [ʒɑ̃ lwi ɛʁnɛst mɛsɔnje]; 21 February 1815 – 31 January 1891) was a French academic painter and sculptor. He became famous for his depictions of Napoleon and his military sieges and manoeuvres in painti
- Ernest Meissonier - Napoleon I in 1814 — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
