Ulans Driving off a Herd of Horses from Honvéd Hussars

By 1863, when Franz Adam painted this in Munich, the war it remembers had been over for more than a decade. Hungary rose against Habsburg rule in 1848, and its hastily raised national army, the Honvéd, leaned on the hussar, the light horseman who was the country's pride. The revolt was crushed in 1849 with Russian help, and Hungary passed under direct rule from Vienna. Adam, who painted horses and soldiers all his life, picked the least heroic moment he could. There is no charge here and no clash of lines. For a hussar the horse was his living and his standing, the thing that made him a hussar at all. What the canvas shows is the loss of exactly that: imperial uhlans, lancers of the emperor's side, driving a captured herd away across open ground while the dismounted hussars can only watch it go.