The Gallic Women: Episode from the Roman Invasion

Glaize signed this canvas in 1851, and it reached the Salon of 1852 months after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power in a coup. In 1853 the new imperial state bought it. Since the historian Amédée Thierry's history of the Gauls in 1828, the French had been claiming these people as their national ancestors, and Glaize gives them a heroic image. In his own account of the conquest, Julius Caesar describes the women of a besieged Gallic town begging the Romans for mercy from the walls. Here they fight. They crowd a heavy cart, one swinging a sickle above her head and another, robed in cream, pointing out across the battle, while below them a rider tumbles from a rearing black horse. The state sent the painting to the museum in Autun, in Burgundy, the region where Caesar's war was decided at Alesia.