The Flood of Saint-Cloud

In 1855 Paris held its first Exposition Universelle, and Paul Huet sent this canvas, 3 metres wide and the largest picture he ever painted. A landscape at the size usually reserved for history painting was a statement in itself. The place is the park of Saint-Cloud, just west of Paris and then a residence of Emperor Napoleon III, where the Seine has broken its banks and spread along the avenues of trees.

In the foreground a heavily loaded boat is stuck in the water, and three men work at it, one bailing, one standing in the stern, one pushing from the water. At the right a horse-drawn cart comes through with its driver, a cow walking behind, and loose objects, a barrel among them, drift in the current.

Eugène Delacroix, the leading Romantic painter, wrote to Huet that spring that his Flood was a masterpiece. The state bought it in 1857 for the Musée du Luxembourg, the museum of living artists, and it moved to the Louvre in 1874.