Battle of Moscow, 7th September 1812

Louis-François, Baron Lejeune's Battle of Moscow, 7th September 1812 (1822) depicts the Battle of Borodino — called the 'Battle of Moscow' by the French — the bloodiest single-day engagement of the Napoleonic Wars, in which approximately 70,000 men were killed or wounded. Lejeune painted the battle ten years after the event, when Napoleon was in exile and the Grande Armée had long since perished in the Russian catastrophe. As an officer who had served in Russia, Lejeune brought painful personal experience to the canvas. The work, now at the Museum of the History of France in Versailles, is among the most ambitious of his battle paintings and must be read partly as an elegy.

Lejeune employs his characteristic panoramic format with unusual density and darkness — the scale of the battle and the psychological weight of retrospection producing a more sombre composition than his earlier triumphalist works. The smoke, the vast battlefield, and the enormous numbers of figures strain against the compositional conventions of the genre, suggesting the limits of heroic representation.