The Battle of Somosierra, Peninsular War, 30 November 1808

A battle picture made eight years after the battle

The title carries its own dating: the Battle of Somosierra, in the Peninsular War, on 30 November 1808. The catalogue dates the painting to 1816. That gap of eight years is the most useful fact in the record, because it settles what kind of document this is. It is not a witness sketch. It is a battle picture composed after the event, in which cavalry is arranged for legibility, and it should be read as a reconstruction rather than a report.

What the record holds

The location is the National Museum in Warsaw. The dimensions are 81 x 99 cm, a cabinet-scale picture rather than a Salon machine. Romanticism is the style term recorded and French the nationality attached to the painter. The categories include group portraiture alongside Animal Art > Horse, which places named or identifiable figures in the scene rather than anonymous troops. The measured colour families of the image are green and yellow.

What the animal is doing here

In a picture of a cavalry action the horse is the reason the action exists at all: for three centuries a mounted charge was the fastest thing that could be brought to bear on a battlefield. That is the function this register catalogues, and it is the one thing the title of this work states without ambiguity.