The Surrender of Bailén

Casado del Alisal painted this in Paris in 1864. A Spanish painter, working in the French capital, on the one episode of the Napoleonic wars the French preferred to leave alone. In July 1808, near the Andalusian town of Bailén, a whole French corps under General Dupont capitulated to a Spanish army in the field, and the news went round Europe within weeks.

Here the Spanish commander Castaños, in white with a red sash, lifts his hat to Dupont. The meeting did not happen this way. The capitulation was signed days later at a posting house in Andújar, and several of the officers assembled here were somewhere else at the time, one French general already dead at Mengíbar.

The model for the scene was hanging in Madrid. Casado built it on Velázquez's Surrender of Breda, where the victor receives the beaten commander with exactly this courtesy. Down in the foreground, among the wounded and the abandoned gun, he signed the canvas Casado del Alisal 1864, and the Spanish state bought it from him that same year.