The Siege of Paris (1870-1871)

In September 1870, after Napoleon III's army surrendered at Sedan, the Prussians surrounded Paris, and the city held out through a winter of shelling and hunger until the end of January 1871. Meissonier began this small canvas during the siege and dated it '70', yet he kept working on it until around 1884, when it was first exhibited. He called it a kind of heroic symphony of France, a memorial to the famous and unknown dead. At the centre stands Paris as a woman in a lion skin and mourning veils, a sword in her hand, beneath the tricolour. Against her side kneels the dying painter Henri Regnault, killed at Buzenval in January 1871, aged 27. In the smoky sky above, the Prussian eagle swoops with the gaunt ghost of Famine. Meissonier's widow left the painting to the State in 1898.