O Sonho

By 1888, France had spent nearly two decades brooding over its defeat by Prussia in 1870, and Édouard Detaille gave that mood a picture. Young conscripts of the Third Republic lie asleep in a field after summer manoeuvres, their rifles stacked, campfires trailing to the horizon. Above them the dawn clouds fill with the ghostly ranks of earlier French armies, the soldiers of the Revolution and of Napoleon, marching in the sleepers' dreams. It reads as a promise that the next generation would take its revenge. The state bought the huge canvas straight from the Salon that year, and it went on to Paris and later San Francisco as a showpiece of national feeling. The sky is nearly half the painting, and the fires below run right off the edge of the field.