Painting by Les Misérables illustrator new on view 

Well-known for his illustrative work, including Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables, French artist Émile Bayard’s Siege of Paris is on view for the first time at SLAM. The six-foot-wide painting, on view in Pauline Gehner Mesker Gallery 205, also coincides with the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition.  

In Siege of Paris, a man drives a group of horses across a bridge over the Seine river in Paris. The animals’ faces are strikingly emotional, their ribs protruding from their emaciated bodies. Dark clouds overhead and the intense contrast of light and shadow throughout the picture underscore the dramatic scene. Bayard’s work references the four-month-long siege of the city by the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian War. 

The Prussian army cut off resources during the fall of 1870 and into early 1871. Hardship and hunger wracked the city, forcing citizens to eat their horses or succumb to starvation. The wasted horses shown in Bayard’s painting are being led to an abattoir, or slaughterhouse, where they will be killed for their meat.    

This work was acquired in 2023 as a gift of Angela Miller in honor of her father, Dr. Dwight C. Miller. Its SLAM debut coincides with the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, which took place in Paris in 1874. This exhibition featured 30 artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, and Berthe Morisot. At this time, Paris was still recovering from the recent and brutal siege, causing artists to rethink their work and discover new styles.  

According to the National Gallery of Art, the Impressionist exhibition “was a defiant response to the official, government-sponsored annual exhibition known as the Paris Salon,” a cultural event that vehemently defended tradition. The Impressionist artists diverged from the stifling environment of the Salon to create their own niche, leading to the first Impressionist exhibition and the emergence of a new movement. Bayard was not a member of the Impressionist painters; instead, his Siege of Paris was featured in the Paris Salon’s 1874 exhibition.

Bayard’s work relates to many of the paintings on view in the Impressionist exhibition through its representation of modern life, a common theme in Impressionism. The brushwork in Siege of Paris, particularly the palette knife work in the sky, is similar to the use of the palette knife by Cezanne in his work on view in Impressionist exhibition. 

Bayard was well-known in the 19th century as a Salon painter and book illustrator. Born in 1837 in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, he was a published cartoonist by the age of 15. As an adult, the artist worked with magazines and journals sketching current events. However, as photography became more popular in the late 19th century, Bayard turned toward illustration and away from documentary drawing. Hugo commissioned Bayard to illustrate several characters from the original publication of Les Misérables. Bayard’s Cosette, a cowering young girl with a distressed face and ripped clothing, is now the official logo of the Les Misérables franchise.  

Other illustrations by Bayard appeared in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, L’Immortel by Alphonse Daudet, and From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne.