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Notes:
It was the Romantics, the children of their time, who fed off the nostalgia for the Napoleonic epic and who for the most part painted the disaster in Russia. Charlet, a pupil of Gros's bets known for his lithographs, presented at the Salon of 1836 this intensely dramatic and poignant painting. Here we see the remains of the Grande Armée, a headless army, falling ever deeper, weighed down by snow. Overwhelmed by this painting Musset was to write: "This is human wretchedness, alone beneath a leaden sky, on the frozen ground, without guide, without leader, without distinction, this is despair in the desert". K.H. tr. P.H.
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