December 10-13, 2024 Firearms & Militaria
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 12/10/2024
Attributed to Nicolas Charles Oudinot (French, 1767-1847), “Muraille de Mer [Sea Wall].”; pen and ink on paper, 6 ¾ x 9 inches (view) within glazed and matted frame; signed on lower left “Oudinot…Barc.[elo]na 1825.” Fine view of the harbor of Barcelona as viewed from the great sea wall, with carriage and mounted lancers in the foreground. Nicolas Charles Oudinot was a career French officer of distinction, serving with great merit in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. A soldier’s soldier, he is known to have been wounded 34 times in battle at the head of his troops. In 1808 he was made governor of Erfurt and Count of the French Empire and a year later, following the battle of Wagram, appointed a “Marshal of France” by Napoleon. From 1810 to 1812 Oudinot administered the government of the former Kingdom of Holland, and commanded the II Corps of La Grande Armée in the Russian campaign. He held important commands at the Battle of Leipzig and in the campaign of 1814. On Napoleon's abdication, he rallied to the new government, and was made a Peer of France by the Bourbon Restoration King Louis XVIII. Unlike many of his old comrades, he did not desert to his former master during Bonaparte's 1815 return. His last active service was in the French invasion of Spain in 1823, in which he commanded a corps and was for a time governor of Madrid. He died as Governor of the Parisian veterans institution Les Invalides (now the French Army Museum and site of Napeleon’s tomb). Condition: near fine, paper bright and clean; conservation-mounted.