2-999-530 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

The Attack at Dawn, 1877. The scene is a French town in the Jura region, near the Swiss border. As a bugler sounds the alarm, French troops (Algerian riflemen and members of the Garde Mobile) rush from an inn to defend themselves from the advancing Prussians. Rather than dwelling on France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), de Neuville, a veteran of the war, specialized in works glorifying his country's heroic resistance rather than its military defeat. He took exceptional efforts to re-create the subjects factually, revisiting the battlefields and studying the weapons, uniforms, and other paraphernalia of war.