Officier de chasseurs à cheval de la garde impériale chargeant

Gericault showed this at the Paris Salon that opened in the autumn of 1812, and the timing gives it a strange edge. That same season Napoleon's Grande Armee was marching to disaster in Russia, and the empire's cavalry, the very glamour this picture celebrates, was being destroyed in the snow. The officer twists in his saddle, sabre raised, on a horse rearing back from something off to the side, the whole thing built on a violent diagonal and painted with a speed that matches its subject. Gericault was only twenty-one and this was the first work he ever exhibited, yet it won a gold medal. When he made a companion piece two years later, Napoleon had fallen, and its wounded soldier retreats instead of charging.