With her wounded arm bandaged and the jacket of a French soldier draped over her, a young girl, Marie, sleeps on an ancient monument to a medieval knight, undisturbed by the commotion of the soldiers on the left outside the tomb. The eponymous “daughter of the regiment” was the lead character of Gaetano Donizetti’s popular opera La Fille du Régiment (1840). In this story, she is born to an aristocratic Englishwoman and a French officer fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. After his death, Marie is adopted by the officers of his regiment. This tender scene of the artist’s imagining speaks to the human cost of war and the hope of a resolution to come.
Text: Yale Center for British Art.
