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Horace Vernet
Horace Vernet
	Self-Portrait with Pipe, 1835
Born	Émile Jean-Horace Vernet; 30 June 1789; Paris, France
Died	17 January 1863 (aged 73); Paris, France
Known for	Painter; draughtsman; lithographer;
Movement	Orientalist

Émile Jean-Horace Vernet (French pronunciation: [emil ʒɑ̃ ɔʁas vɛʁnɛ]; 30 June 1789 – 17 January 1863) more commonly known as simply Horace Vernet, was a French painter of battles, portraits, and Orientalist subjects.

Biography

Early career

Vernet was born to Carle Vernet, another famous painter, who was himself a son of Claude Joseph Vernet. He was born in the Paris Louvre, while his parents were staying there during the French Revolution. Vernet quickly developed a disdain for the high-minded seriousness of academic French art work which was distinguished by art influenced by Classicism, and decided to paint subjects taken mostly from contemporary life. During his early career, when Napoleon Bonaparte was in power, he began depicting the French soldier in a more familiar, vernacular manner rather than in an idealized, Davidian fashion; he was just twenty when he exhibited the Taking of an Entrenched Camp^[1] Some other of his paintings that represent French soldiers in a more direct, less idealizing style, include Dog of the Regiment, Trumpeter's Horse, and Death of Poniatowski.

Restoration France

He gained recognition during the Bourbon Restoration for a series of battle paintings commissioned by the duc d'Orleans, the future King Louis-Philippe. Critics marvelled at the incredible speed with which he painted.^[3] Many of his paintings made during this early phase of his career were "noted for their historical accuracy as well as their charged landscapes".^[4] Examples of paintings in this style include his Four Battles series: The Battle of Jemappes (1821), The Battle of Montmirail (1822), The Battle of Hanau (1824), and The Battle of Valmy (1826). Enjoying equal favour with the court and with the opposition, he was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome, from 1829 to 1835.^[1]

Over the course of his long career, Horace Vernet was honoured with dozens of important commissions. King Louis-Philippe was one of his most prolific patrons,^[3] and the whole of the Constantine room at the Palace of Versailles was decorated by him, in the short space of three years.^[1] The King requested that he paint a gallery dedicated to the "fruits of colonization". At the time, France was colonizing Algeria through war, and claiming it to be part of their mission civilisatrice, or their "civilizing mission". In a neoclassical style, reflecting the Roman colonization in North Africa about 2000 years before, Horace painted pictures of French non-commissioned officers training Algerian soldiers, French engineers building Algerian roads, and French soldiers tilling Algerian fields.^[5]^[6]

Later career

His depictions of Algerian battles, such as the Capture of the Smahla and the Capture of Constantine, were well received by other French people, as they were vivid depictions of their army in the heat of battle. After the fall of the July Monarchy during the Revolution of 1848, Vernet discovered a new patron in Napoléon III of France. He continued to paint representations of the heroic French army during the Second Empire and maintained his commitment to and realistic way. He accompanied the French Army during the Crimean War, producing several paintings, truthfully including one of the Battle of the Alma, which was not as well received as his earlier paintings. One well known and possibly apocryphal anecdote maintains that when Vernet was asked to remove a certain obnoxious general from one of his paintings, he replied, "I am a painter of history, sire, and I will not violate the truth", hence demonstrating his fidelity to representing war.

Vernet also developed an interest in daguerreotype photography. He took photographs in Egypt as reference material for his paintings, and during a stop at Malta in March 1840 while en route to Egypt, he took the earliest known photographs of the island at Fort Manoel. Today these early photographs are believed to be lost.^[7]

His nephew Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, also a painter and his pupil, wrote Voyage d'Horace Vernet en Orient (2 volumes, 1844).

Vernet died in his hometown of Paris in 1863.

Literary references

In Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter", Holmes claims to be related to Vernet, stating, "My ancestors were country squires... my grandmother... was the sister of Vernet, the French artist"; it is generally assumed that this individual is Émile Jean-Horace Vernet, due to the fact that Horace was only 65 years older than Sherlock Holmes while the other Vernets lived much before. The Holmes-Vernet connection is also central to the plot of Laurie R. King's 2024 novel, The Lantern's Dance.

Gallery

Portrait of Roustam Raza, 1810
The Battle of Somosierra, 1816
The Death of Prince Poniatowski, 1816
The Battle of Tolosa, 1817
The Dog of the Regiment Wounded, 1819
Siege of Saragossa, 1819
Portrait of the Général Marquis de Talhouët-Roy, 1819
Massacre of the Mamelukes at Cairo, 1819
The Barrier of Clichy, 1820
Portrait of Marshal Saint-Cyr, 1821
Napoleon's Tomb, 1821
The Battle of Jemappes, 1821
The Artist's Studio, 1821
Vesuvius Erupting, 1822
Plague in Barcelona, 1822
Portrait of Pablo Morillo, 1822
Joseph Vernet Tied to a Mast During a Storm, 1822
Allan M'Aulay, 1823
The Quarry, 1823
Napoleon in Charleroi, 1823
Conrad the Corsair, 1824
Duck Shooting, 1824
Duke of Angoulême, 1824
The Battle of Montmirail, 1824
The Battle of Hanau, 1824
Napoleon Bids Farewell to His Guard, 1824
Napoleon at the Battle of Arcole, 1826
The Battle of Valmy, 1826
Pope Julius II ordering Bramante and Michelangelo to design St Peter's Basilica, 1827
Edith Recovering Harold's Body after the Battle of Hastings, 1827
The Battle of Bouvines, 1827
Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Isabey, 1828
The Battle of Fontenoy, 1828
Pope Pius VIII brought to the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, 1829
An Algerian Lady Hawking, 1829
Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, 1829
Portrait of Louise Vernet, 1830
Polish Prometheus, 1831
Judith et Holopherne, 1831
Study of Olympe Pelissier as Judith, 1831
Portrait of Marshal Molitor, 1831
The Duke of Orleans leaving the Palais-Royal, 1832
Raphael at the Vatican, 1832
Hunting in the Pontine Marshes, 1833
Carlo Alberto of Savoy, 1834
The Battle of Friedland, 1835
The Battle of Wagram, 1835
The Battle of Jena, 1836
The Slave Market, 1836
The Capture of Constantine, 1838
Napoleon at the Tuileries, 1838
Battle of the Tagus, 1840
The Siege of Antwerp, 1840
The Battle of Habrah, 1840
Judah and Tamar, 1840
Scene from the Mexican Expedition in 1838, 1841
Arabs Travelling in the Desert, 1843
Louis Philippe and His Sons, 1846
The Battle of Isly, 1846
The Angel of Death, 1851
The Battle of the Alma, 1856
Zouaves at the Malakoff, 1856
Portrait of Pierre Bosquet, 1857
François Certain de Canrobert, 1857
The Taking of the Malakoff Redoubt, 1858
A Wounded Zouave, 1858
Portrait of Marshal MacMahon, 1860

References

^ ^a ^b ^c One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Vernet s.v. Émile Jean Horace Vernet". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 1030–1031.
^ "Washington and Lee University". Home.wlu.edu. Archived from the original on 2013-10-12. Retrieved 2012-06-11.
^ ^a ^b Ruutz-Rees, Janet E. (Janet Emily) (1880). Horace Vernet. New York: Scribner and Welford.
^ The Art of War[s]: Paintings of Heroes, Horrors and History – Chase Maenius
^ James, Lawrence (2017). Empires in the sun : the struggle for the mastery of Africa (First Pegasus books hardcover ed.). New York. ISBN 9781681774633. OCLC 959869470.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^ SESSIONS, JENNIFER E. (2011). "By Sword and Plow". By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (1st ed.). Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801456527. JSTOR 10.7591/j.ctt20fw60j.
^ Bonello, Giovanni (10 February 2019). "But who was the first Maltese photographer?". Times of Malta. Archived from the original on 30 June 2020.