General Dorsenne at Aspern-Essling: Arms Folded under Fire (NAP0243)

Dorsenne: the commander who is holding nothing

Look at his hands. He has no sword out, no reins gathered, no gesture — his arms are folded and he is sitting still on a black horse in front of a line of the Guard. On either side, two officers stand with their sabres lowered, equally motionless. At the horse’s feet lies a dead man; on the right there is a gun and its limber. The Austrian artillery is firing into this line, and nobody in the picture is doing anything about it.

That is the whole subject, and it is a technique

When infantry is being shelled and has orders to stay, there is no useful action available. The men cannot shoot back — the guns are too far — and they cannot advance or lie down without giving up the position. All that is left is whether they stay, and that is decided by what they can see. An officer who is visibly unbothered makes the situation look survivable; one who flinches ends the formation in about a minute.

The folded arms are the most efficient version of it

Anything held in the hands can shake. Folded arms cannot, and they read at fifty metres. It is a small piece of theatre performed at real risk, and its point is that everybody in the line can check on him without turning round. Dorsenne had a reputation for exactly this coldness — and for being the best-looking man in the army, which in an institution that ran on visible example was not a trivial asset.

Standing still is the most expensive thing infantry does

A unit under bombardment loses men steadily and gains nothing. There is no exchange: the casualties buy time for somebody else, somewhere else. At Aspern-Essling that somebody was the rest of the army, withdrawing across broken bridges to the island of Lobau — the story in NAP0051. The Guard’s function that day was to be expensive on purpose.

Rava painted this scene twice, nineteen years apart

NAP0051 is the watercolour of 2005: wider, with the dead and wounded across the whole foreground — it is about the battle. This is the oil of 2024, closer and more monumental, and it is about the man. Same officer, same pose, same day, two entirely different subjects — which is a useful demonstration that a painting’s subject is a decision about framing, not a fact about the event.

The same motif at Eylau, two years earlier

The Guard standing under fire and not being spent appears again in NAP0027, in the snow, with the muskets carried at the shoulder. 🔗 Together the two plates say something the campaign histories tend to skip: the Imperial Guard’s most frequent activity was not attacking. It was waiting, visibly, where it could be seen.