The Art in War
- Eduardo Montes-Bradley
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
What would become of us if Napoleon had not dragged an entire cohort of painters, draughtsmen, engravers, and visual chroniclers onto the battlefields of Europe? Forget the generals, forget the cooks, forget the laundresses and prostitutes trudging behind the regiments—Napoleon’s single most useful innovation for future historians was his insistence on recording the spectacle.
Without Jacques-Louis David framing the emperor as destiny incarnate, without Antoine-Jean Gros painting the wounded at Eylau or the smoke-blurred chaos of Arcole, without Carle Vernet capturing cavalry charges with terrifying precision, we would have almost no visual vocabulary with which to reconstruct the 19th century as it unfolded for millions of people. These artists were documentary filmmakers before the invention of film; they gave us documents, not merely canvases.
And here I am, deep in the edit of George Frederick Bristow (1825–1898), grateful every day for the painters who immortalized conflict, because without them much of American early history would be visually mute. The American Revolution, for example, has become “visible” to us largely through works created decades after the fact—Benjamin West imagining the death of General Wolfe, John Trumbull restaging the Declaration of Independence, Emanuel Leutze painting Washington Crossing the Delaware from a Düsseldorf studio in 1851. The Revolution is remembered in the aesthetic language of the Napoleonic era—heroic light, theatrical clouds, horses rearing in deliberate choreography—even though the events predated Napoleon’s birth. In other words, the American story is told through the Napoleonic eye, because those painters taught the world how war, nationhood, and myth should look.
But when I turn to George Polgreen Bridgetower, born in 1780 in the contested lands of Biała—when Poland was being carved up by Russia, Austria, and Prussia like a roast on a nobleman’s table—I find a desert. No sweeping battle scenes of the partitions, no heroic cavalry panoramas, no equivalents of Gros or Vernet galloping behind the armies. Why? Because there were barely any battles worth painting. Much of the “action” consisted of diplomats and generals dividing territory over maps and bottles of vodka. Artists painted the uniformed men posing in imagined landscapes, not the conflict itself. There was no spectacle, no glory, no grand tableau to inspire brushstrokes. The painters of that period gave us portraits, not history.
And so, working on the Bridgetower film, I am left with almost nothing—certainly nothing like David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps or Vernet’s luminous cavalry charges. The story of Bridgetower’s early years, entangled with the silent violence of the partitions, must be reconstructed from fragments, documents, engravings, and imagination. If only a Vernet or a Gros had been there to witness the dissolution of Poland! Perhaps then we would have the visual architecture needed to tell this chapter as richly as it deserves.
This is why, as I move between Bristow and Bridgetower, I increasingly see that we documentarians of the present depend on the documentarians of the past and the art in war.
The Art in War
Those vast canvases—painted by artists paid to glorify emperors and battles—have now become our raw material. They are documents, not simply works of art. They are the visual record that allows us to animate history, to give shape to events, to place our subjects in a world that would otherwise exist only in text and memory.
And if one day artificial intelligence can paint the partitions of Poland in the sweeping manner of Gros or the luminous turbulence of Vernet, then I say: let it. The purists may protest, but history has always been reconstructed through hindsight. The great battle paintings of the 1800s were themselves created long after the fact, often with more imagination than accuracy. The point is not to replicate an exact truth but to give the viewer the visual entry point they need to step into a story.
We tell history through images because human beings remember images. And without the images given to us by the battlefield artists of the 19th century, much of our visual history—European and American—would simply not exist.