Two Soldiers

In the lower left corner Thomas Couture wrote, in French, that this was a study made for the enrolment of the volunteers of 1792. The project behind it came out of a revolution. In 1848 the new Second Republic, born in the February rising that toppled King Louis-Philippe, commissioned from Couture a vast canvas for the meeting hall of the National Assembly in Paris. He chose the summer of 1792, when the country was declared in danger and Parisians crowded forward to sign up and march against the invading armies. These two soldiers belong to that crowd. The big picture was never finished. After Louis-Napoleon seized power and made himself emperor, the new regime judged the scene too demagogic and turned down the changes Couture offered. The unfinished canvas, more than nine metres wide, is now in the departmental museum of the Oise at Beauvais, north of Paris, together with many of its drawings and studies. This one was already in Boston in 1877, when the museum bought it from the local dealers Doll and Richards.