Seated Cavalier

Before becoming Napoleonʼs official painter of military exploits, Meissonier produced genre scenes with figures dressed in eighteenth-century costume. This is one of two large-scale studies in the Cohen gift that is preparatory for a miniature-scale painted composition depicting two men discussing the Siege of Bergen op Zoom, a 1747 maneuver in which the French army captured the Dutch town. This genre scene, for a painting only two inches in diameter, hints at Meissonierʼs ultimate ambition as a military painter.