01 Work, The art of War, Emil Hünten's Battle of Mars-La-Tour, August 16,1870, with Footnotes

Emil Hünten  (1827–1902)

Battle of Mars-La-Tour, August 16,1870 , c. 1902

On behalf of the Supreme Prince Henry VII of Reuss in Bonn.

Oil on canvas

height: 140 cm (55.1 in); width: 205 cm (80.7 in)

Bismarck-Museum, Friedrichsruh

Battles of Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte, (Aug. 16–18, 1870), two major engagements of the Franco-German War in which the 140,000-man French Army of the Rhine, under Marshal Achille-François Bazaine, failed to break through the two German armies under General Helmuth von Moltke and were bottled up in the fortress of Metz. It was followed by the Count de Mac-Mahon’s abortive attempt to rescue Bazaine, which ended in Mac-Mahon’s crushing defeat at Sedan.

The French Army had been in retreat and its command in a state of shock since German victories in the first week of August. Bazaine was given command of the Army of the Rhine on August 12, as it was falling back from Metz toward Verdun. He was intercepted on August 16 by the German general Constantine von Alvensleben’s III Corps of 30,000 men near Vionville, east of Mars-la-Tour. Alvensleben, with one-quarter the troops of Bazaine, captured and secured Vionville, thus blocking the French escape route toward the west. The resulting Battle of Mars-la-Tour included the last major cavalry engagement in western Europe. Each side suffered about 16,000 casualties. More on Battle of Mars-La-Tour

Emil Johannes Hünten (19 January 1827 – 1 February 1902) was a German military painter. His works were often lithographed.

Born in Paris on 19 January 1827, he studied art under Hippolyte Flandrin and Horace Vernet at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. In 1848, he moved to Antwerp to work in the studios of Gustaf Wappers and Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans, before heading to Düsseldorf in 1851 where his teachers were Julius Lessing and Wilhelm Camphausen.

With such influences, it is not surprising that the artist began to paint historical scenes from the life of Frederick the Great, and gradually turned to military subjects. His work appealed to Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia who invited him to accompany the army on the campaign in Schleswig-Holstein in 1864. Two years later, Hünten was attached to the Prussian forces in the Austro-Prussian War, and four year later, he covered the Franco-Prussian War.

Among his customers were many famous people. Otto von Bismarck ordered a scene from the Battle of Gravelotte. He won medals for his works at Berlin (1872) and Vienna (1873), and became a member of the Berlin Academy in 1878. He excelled also as a painter of horses. 

He died at Düsseldorf on 1 February 1902. More on Emil Johannes Hünten

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