Pompiers courant à un incendie

Courbet began this huge night scene of Paris firemen around 1850, a crew hauling their hand-drawn pump toward a blaze while a workman raises the alarm. He had firemen act out a departure by torchlight so he could study the movement, and he borrowed the idea of a company setting off from Rembrandt's Night Watch, which he had seen in Amsterdam. He never finished it. Courbet was working near a Paris fire station when Louis-Napoleon seized power in the coup of December 1851, and the upheaval ended the project. The rolled-up canvas was found in his studio after his death and given to the city by his sister Juliette. It stayed unseen for years and now hangs in the Petit Palais in Paris.