Picturing War in France, 1792–1856 by Katie Hornstein (review)

Hornstein's book examines the relationships between war, art, and society in the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century. She divides her study chronologically into four periods: the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the Restoration, the July Monarchy, and the Crimean War. In considering works of military-themed art in these four periods, Hornstein seeks to "investigate what [pictures of war] reveal about the transformations of art, its audiences, and its production [...] during the nineteenth century" (5). While this art-history-based focus is the primary thread of Hornstein's study, the work nevertheless also presents interesting perspectives on sociopolitical issues involved in the making of military art, such as the government's desire to shape public opinion through the production of certain types of art, or the public's reaction to such images, a reaction which did not always correspond to the government's original intent. The book contains over 140 figures including paintings, engravings, lithographs, and photographs, which the author employs to good effect. Hornstein offers detailed exegesis of these images, along with synthetic contextualization to make clear how sociopolitical factors impacted the military artist's work, and how military art was influenced by, and in turn influenced, a broader tradition of artistic production. For example, in her chapter on the Restoration, Hornstein considers the tension between the government's opposition to Napoleonic depictions and the public's continued hunger for such paintings, while simultaneously examining the question of genre and how engravings and lithography expanded discourse on both art and politics beyond the salon and into a more public arena. Or to take another example, in her chapter on the Crimean War, Hornstein studies the new genre of photography, its ambition to show the "truth" (128), "volume" (128), and "totality" (137) of war. At the same time, she examines the ways in which battle painting evolved as the scope of combat zones changed, and artists working in multiple genres, such as Durand-Brager, borrowed from photographs to show both the panorama and details of war in their work. The connections highlighted in these two examples are typical of the entire study. Stylistically, Hornstein's writing is lucid, flowing, and sophisticated. While the intellectual content of the book is clearly aimed at professional specialists in art history, the clarity of expression renders the work quite accessible to a broad readership, from professional scholars to advanced undergraduates. This wide appeal makes Hornstein's study a worthy addition to the reading list of any educated reader with an interest in art, war, and society.