Édouard Detaille

In 1888, France was still nursing the wound of 1870, the year Prussia beat her badly and took Alsace and Lorraine. That summer the general Boulanger had the country half-dreaming of a war of revenge, and it was into that mood that Édouard Detaille sent his large canvas Le Rêve, The Dream, to the Paris Salon.

It shows young conscripts asleep in a field during summer maneuvers, probably in Champagne, their rifles stacked and their campfires low. In the pale sky above them march the ghostly armies of France's past victories, the very glory the exhausted boys are dreaming of. The Salon gave it the gold medal and the State bought it at once.

Detaille had trained under Ernest Meissonier, the great painter of Napoleonic battle scenes, and he inherited his teacher's obsession with getting every button and strap exactly right. He became known as the semi-official painter of the French army, spending years recording its uniforms and drills. Le Rêve still hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, its sleeping conscripts dreaming of a revenge that arrived in 1914, in trenches that looked nothing like this open field.