Alphonse de Neuville

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Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville.jpg
Alphonse de Neuville:
The last cartouches : the defense of the Auberge Bourgerie in the battle for Bazeilles near Sedan on September 1, 1870.
Alphonse de Neuville: The Saint-Privat Cemetery, 1881, oil on canvas, Musée d´Orsay, Paris; The Saint-Privat cemetery near Metz turned into a bloody battlefield, on which 42,000 soldiers died. On August 18, 1870, the French troops, recognizable by their red trousers, fought there on their last legs against the Prussian army. The light that penetrates through the battle smoke in the upper part of the picture emphasizes the drama of the fight. Neuville emphasizes with his presentation that defeat can also be honorable. With the picture he defends republican patriotism and strengthens the French striving for revenge. The painting, which was first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1881, earned the artist the title of officer of the Legion of Honor.

Alphonse de Neuville (born May 31, 1836 in Saint-Omer ( Pas-de-Calais ), † May 20, 1885 in Paris ) was a French battle painter .

Life

Neuville came from a wealthy family. After he had completed his school years with the Abitur, he began to study engineering at the Naval Academy in Lorient ( Brittany ) in 1856 .

During this time, de Neuville began to be interested in painting and became a student of the painter François-Édouard Picot . Through his mediation, de Neuville later came under as a pupil in Eugène Delacroix's studio . In 1859, on the occasion of an exhibition in the Paris Salon , de Neuville made his debut painting an "Episode from the Crimean War ".

In the meantime, numerous illustrations have been created for the publishers Calman Lévy and Pierre-Jules Hertzel . Among the illustrated works were authors such as Alexandre Dumas , Jules Verne and François Guizot .

After he had participated in the Franco-German War as an engineer officer, a second period of his artistic activity began. In post-war France, Neuville quickly became a sought-after battle painter. Together with Ernest Meissonier and Edouard Detaille , he was an artist of moral renewal after the lost war, which was perceived as a “French drama”. The painters "... from then on pursued a patriotic style that developed into a school and today would probably be discounted as militarist propaganda". Neuville established his fame with the painting Bivouac in front of the village of Le Bourget after the battle of December 21, 1870 , which was exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1872.

Alphonse de Neuville died shortly before the age of 49 in Paris in 1885, where he rests in the Montmartre cemetery . The grave is adorned with a bust of the artist and the symbolic female figure "The plaintive France", made of marble, both works by Francis de Saint-Vidal (1840–1900).

Awards and honors

  • 1873: Knight of the Legion of Honor after the success of his painting The Last Cartouches in the Paris Salon
  • 1881: Officer of the Legion of Honor, following the success of his painting The Saint-Privat Cemetery in the Paris Salon
  • 1888: Renaming of rue Brémontier , in which Alphonse de Neuville on the corner of boulevard Pereire owned a hôtel particulier built by the architect Gerhardt , into rue Alphonse de Neuville , by the city of Paris.
  • 1889: erection of a statue on Place Wagram in Paris (destroyed).

Works (selection)

  • 1861: The guard hunters at the trench of the Mamelon Vert
  • 1864: Magenta street attack by the hunters
  • 1866: The Guards (Museum of St. Omer)
  • 1866: The Zouave Sentinel
  • 1867: The Battle of San Lorenzo in Mexico
  • 1868: Hunters on foot, wading through the Chernaya (1888/1890 in the museum in Lille)
  • 1872: Bivouac in front of the village of Le Bourget (1888/1890 in the museum in Dijon)
  • 1873: The last cartouches at Balan (distributed in countless reproductions through copperplate engraving, woodcut, photography, etc.)
  • 1874: The fight on the railroad tracks
  • 1874: In the ditch . Oil on canvas, 57.7 cm × 96.5 cm, Walters Art Museum , Baltimore , Maryland , USA
  • 1875: Attack of a barricaded house by Villersexel (a sketch, oil on canvas, 83 cm × 62 cm, is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris )
  • 1878: Le Bourget , private collection, New York (also widely distributed through reproductions, the sketch, oil on canvas, 79 cm × 58 cm is in Paris in the Musée d'Orsay)
  • 1880: The Defense of Rorke's Drift
  • 1881: The Saint-Privat cemetery on August 18, 1870 , also The Saint-Privat cemetery , Paris, Musée d'Orsay
  • 1881: The dispatcher
  • ???: Prussian prisoners in the church of Villersexel
  • ???: The panorama of the Battle of Champigny

literature

  • Philippe Chabert: Alphonse de Neuville, l'épopée de la défaite , Ed. Copernic, Paris 1979.
  • R. Henard (Ed.): Alphonse de Neuveille , catalog for the exhibition of the same name in Saint-Omer, 1978, p. 16.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Michael Epkenhans, Gerhard Paul Gross: Military and the departure in the modern age, 1860 to 1890: Armies, navies and the change of politics, society and economy in Europe, the USA and Japan, p. 37, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2003, ISBN 978-3-486-56760-1 .
  2. ↑ See R. Henard: Alphonse de Neuville , p. 16.

Web links

Commons : Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Neuville, Alphonse de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French battle painter
DATE OF BIRTH May 31, 1836
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint-Omer
DATE OF DEATH May 20, 1885
Place of death Paris