Die Barrière de Clichy

The scene is 30 March 1814, the last day Paris held out as the armies allied against Napoleon closed on the city. Vernet had actually stood at this northern tollgate, the barrière de Clichy, as a young man in the National Guard, and it was the only real fighting he ever saw. He painted it six years later, in 1820, for a goldsmith who had fought there beside him. By then Napoleon was gone and the restored monarchy had no wish to honour the defenders of the empire, so the picture was refused from the Salon of 1822 as politically awkward. He shows the guardsmen weary and waiting rather than in the thick of battle, a defence everyone in the painting already seems to sense is lost.