Un cavaliere

France lost the war of 1870 to 1871 badly, with Paris besieged, the emperor captured and two provinces handed to the new German Empire, and for years afterward that humiliation fed a hunger for pictures of soldiers. De Neuville, who had served as an officer in the war, made it his trade. This single mounted figure, painted in 1884, is a trumpeter in a regiment of French dragoons, sitting his horse against a plain yellow ground so nothing distracts from the uniform and the man. He researched kit and bearing carefully, in the crisp, detailed manner of Meissonier, the leading military painter of the day. De Neuville died the following year, at 49.