La Paix vient consoler les hommes et leur ramène l'Abondance Copie réduite de la partie centrale du plafond du salon de la Paix à l'Hôtel-de-Ville, peint par Delacroix

In 1871 the Paris Commune's burning of the Hôtel de Ville destroyed Eugène Delacroix's celebrated ceiling painting in the Salon de la Paix — one of the great monumental works of French Romanticism. Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta had already made a careful reduced copy of the central section before the destruction, and this 1871 canvas in the Musée Carnavalet preserves that documentation work as both an artistic homage and a historical record. Raimundo was living in Paris through the Commune and its violent suppression — witnessing one of the most traumatic events in nineteenth-century French history firsthand. His copy of the Delacroix ceiling is thus simultaneously a technical exercise in the copyist tradition, a preservationist act, and an implicitly political gesture: choosing to document a destroyed masterpiece of French cultural patrimony. The Carnavalet Museum, devoted to the history of Paris, is the appropriate repository for this historically charged work.

Copy painting requires suppressing one's own tendencies to faithfully render another artist's style and color. Raimundo must translate Delacroix's powerful colorism and energetic handling into his own technical means while remaining subordinate to the original's visual and conceptual character. The reduced scale also required compressing the spatial and figurative complexity of a ceiling into an easel-format composition.