I'm pleased to be shown these other examples. They represent important cultural images and different approaches serve different purposes. Getting people interested in a subject is a huge fete, and these illustrations do that.
These are very pretty pictures. One cannot view these and fail to be impressed by the colors, designs, the swords and the horses. Green and white are particularly majestic, especially on a brown horse. Red and blue on a white horse gets the heart pumping. "Capitalising on a wave of nostalgia" for Napoleon seems reasonable (and part of me hopes it never ends!) So does imagining these uniforms stained with blood and vomit and filled with the lifeless, mutilated corpses of hundreds of thousands of teenage boys who probably also liked the green and white, the blue and red, the gleaming weapons, and the mistaken belief that they died for someone who valued their lives.
Eugene Lami, the artist most responsible for this collection, expressly included several radical compositions that show the horrors of war along with the uniforms.
Do you provide comments on this and discuss pitfalls?? Vernet et Lami surely had a big influence of later military artists and shaping our perception of how they looked like, seemingly at this time when the work was created campaign outlook as of no interest.
Paul Dawson wrote a rather depressing comment on the face book side.
I translated the original text, but did not add a critical commentary other than a few editorial notes. As with any pictorial source for the study of military uniforms, the reliability of the information provided depends on many factors, two of the most important of which are the ability and motivation of the artist to produce accurate depictions. Since they were published in 1822, the paintings in the book are not quite primary source material and it is unlikely that the artists saw all (or even most) of the uniforms first-hand. However, the explicit purpose of the work was the depiction of uniforms from the recent past and the artists knew that their sales would suffer if Napoleonic veterans who wore the uniforms found those depictions to be inaccurate, so they were motivated to do serious research. Furthermore, the Vernets would not have lent their established names to the enterprise if they thought the paintings would detract from their reputations. For these reasons, the paintings provide better data about French uniforms than the later sets of prints such as those by Bellangé and by Noirmont and Marbot (and in some instances it appears that those later works are based on these paintings).
I'm pleased to be shown these other examples. They represent important cultural images and different approaches serve different purposes. Getting people interested in a subject is a huge fete, and these illustrations do that.
Indeed but this was not the intention of those above artists, they did show an indealized version of glamour.
These are very pretty pictures. One cannot view these and fail to be impressed by the colors, designs, the swords and the horses. Green and white are particularly majestic, especially on a brown horse. Red and blue on a white horse gets the heart pumping. "Capitalising on a wave of nostalgia" for Napoleon seems reasonable (and part of me hopes it never ends!) So does imagining these uniforms stained with blood and vomit and filled with the lifeless, mutilated corpses of hundreds of thousands of teenage boys who probably also liked the green and white, the blue and red, the gleaming weapons, and the mistaken belief that they died for someone who valued their lives.
Here are some plates from the book: