1870
oil
panel
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
The Defense of Paris is a 1870 oil by Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, a Impressionism work, depicting World War I, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
You see a small, crowded scene of French soldiers in blue coats firing rifles from behind a barricade. Meissonier painted this during the Franco-Prussian War, when Paris was under siege. He was there—this is a soldier’s memory, not a grand battle. The tiny brushstrokes make the smoke and uniforms feel real, like you could touch them. Look up *impasto* to see how thick paint can make a moment feel alive.
The artist; his estate sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, May 12–13, 1893, cat. 110 for 5,200 francs [price according to an annotated copy of the sale catalogue in the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague]. W. Muller, Paris; sold to George F. Harding Jr. (died 1939), Chicago, August 5, 1924 [according to a Harding Museum record, copy in curatorial file]; bequeathed to the George F. Harding Museum, Chicago; transferred to the Art Institute, 1983; accessioned 1994.
Vallery C. O. Gréard, Meissonier: His Life and his Art (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1897), pp. 257–60. Constance Cain Hungerford, “Meissonier’s ‘Siège de Paris’ and ‘Ruines des Tuileries’,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts ser. 6, 116 (1990), pp. 202–03, 211 n. 11. Constance Cain Hungerford, “‘Les choses importantes’: Meissonier et la peinture d’histoire,” in Philippe Durey and Constance Cain Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier: Rétrospective, exh. cat. (Lyon: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 1993), p. 172 n. 60. Constance Cain Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier: Master in his Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier was a French academic painter and sculptor. He became famous for his depictions of Napoleon and his military sieges and manoeuvres in paintings acclaimed both for the artist's mastery of…
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