Officer

From 1861 to 1875 Meissonier worked on one big canvas, called simply 1807. It shows Napoleon at the battle of Friedland, raising his hat as his cuirassiers, the heavy cavalry in steel breastplates, gallop past him, and it now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He built that picture up piece by piece. Each rider and each horse got its own study, some made from little wax figures he modelled himself, and the story goes that he had a field of wheat planted and trampled by horses so he could see how the stalks lay in June, the month of the battle. This panel, about 10 centimetres high, is one of those studies, an officer in a bicorne hat seen in right profile, one hand on his hip. Meissonier kept such studies in his studio until he died. In May 1893 they were sold in Paris, and this one was catalogued as a study of a senior officer for 1807. Ten years later it turned up at an auction in Boston, where the museum bought it together with a second small panel.