The Balloon

From September 1870 the Prussian army encircled Paris, and for four months the only way to get news out of the city was by air. Balloons carried letters over the enemy lines. Puvis de Chavannes painted this that November, in the middle of the siege. A woman in black, standing for the city itself, holds a rifle with its bayonet fixed and salutes a balloon climbing into a pale sky. Gold letters on the frame spell out the message, the besieged city of Paris entrusts its appeal to France to the air. A lithograph by Émile Vernier made the image famous at once. Puvis later donated the canvas to a lottery in New York for victims of the Chicago fire of 1871, and it stayed in America until a New York gallery gave it to the French national museums in 1987.