Review of the Paris garrison and the royal guard passing through the Champ-de-Mars, September 30, 1824

The review, which is cavalry at its most ceremonial

A military review is the parade-ground version of a field manoeuvre: the same units, the same horses, the same formations, performed to be looked at instead of to achieve anything. It sits between the two poles this register keeps returning to. The animal is doing military work, as in the battle entries, but the purpose is display, as in the court portraits. Anyone reading the cavalry group in this catalogue should read the reviews alongside it, because they show what the units looked like when nothing was at stake.

What the record holds

The title fixes the occasion to a single day, 30 September 1824, and the catalogue dates the painting to 1824 as well. That matters: elsewhere in this register the same painter's picture of an 1808 battle is dated 1816, eight years after the fact. Here title and date agree. The location is the Chateau de Versailles and the dimensions are 389 x 325 cm — the largest measurement in this lot. Romanticism is the recorded style, French the nationality, group portraiture and Animal Art > Horse the categories, and brown the measured colour family.

What agreement between title and date does not prove

A picture made in the year of the event it names is closer to the event than one made eight years later. It is not therefore a record of it. The catalogue holds no note of observation, and this entry claims none.