The Congress of Paris

Between late February and the end of March 1856, the men who had been fighting the Crimean War sat down around a table in Paris to end it. Dubufe painted them there, a room of diplomats from France, Britain, Russia, Austria, Turkey and small Piedmont-Sardinia, gathered to sign the treaty on 30 March. Among the faces is Count Cavour of Piedmont, who had sent troops to the war largely to earn a seat at exactly this table and a hearing for the cause of Italian unity. The arrangement is not Dubufe's own invention. He borrowed the whole composition, the long table and the ring of standing figures, from Jean-Baptiste Isabey's earlier picture of the Congress of Vienna, the gathering that had redrawn Europe some 40 years before. He showed the finished work at the Paris Salon of 1857.