Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville

Who was Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville?

Alphonse de Neuville was a French Academic painter who studied under Eugène Delacroix. His dramatic and intensely patriotic subjects illustrated episodes from the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War, the Zulu War and portraits of soldiers. Some of his works have been collected by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Born Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe Deneuville to wealthy parents at Saint-Omer, Pas-de-Calais, earned his degree of bachelier ès-lettres, and in spite of family opposition, he entered the naval school at Lorient; it was there that his artistic instincts started.

He was discouraged by several painters of repute, but he was admitted to work in the studio of François-Edouard Picot; he did not remain there long. He was painting by himself when he produced his first picture, The Fifth Battalion of Chasseurs at the Gervais Battery. In 1860 Neuville painted an Episode of the taking of Naples by Garibaldi for the Artists' Club in the rue de Provence, and sent it to the Paris Salon in 1861 The Guard Chasseurs in the Trenches of the Mamelon Vert.

He participated in illustrating the Hetzel editions of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He also illustrated Le Tour du monde and Guizot's History of France. At the same time he painted a number of remarkable pictures: The Attack in the Streets of Magenta by Zouaves and the Light Horse, A Zouave Sentinel, The Battle of San Lorenzo, and Dismounted Cavalry crossing the Tchernaia. In these he showed peculiar insight into military life, but his full power was not reached until after the Franco-Prussian War. He then aimed at depicting in his works the episodes of that war, and began by representing the Bivouac before Le Bourget. His fame spread rapidly, and was increased by The Last Cartridges, memorializing an episode involving the Blue Division of the French marines, in which it is easy to discern the vast difference between the conventional treatment of military subjects, as practised by Horace Vernet, and that of a man who had lived the life that he painted.