Horace Vernet

Paul Delaroche portrays his fellow painter Horace Vernet, a celebrated artist known for military and orientalist subjects. The portrait captures Vernet with the confident bearing befitting a director of the French Academy in Rome.

Both painters belonged to the juste milieu, a middle ground between strict Neoclassicism and wild Romanticism. They dominated official French painting in the 1830s-40s. This portrait hangs at the Château de Versailles, appropriate for a painter of Napoleonic military glory.