Art: Versatile Prince

Prince François Ferdinand de Joinville, son of King Louis Philippe of France, was a man of many parts: admiral in the French navy, expert military tactician and accomplished artist. In 1861 De Joinville crossed the Atlantic and joined the staff of Major General George B. McClellan as observer and war artist. He spent almost a year with the Army of the Potomac, followed the Union forces from barracks to field, went with them through the Peninsular Campaign. These experiences produced a brief but scholarly military report, Campagne de I'Armée du Potomac, published in 1862. A more impressive record was the prince's watercolors of life among McClellan's soldiers; everywhere De Joinville went he carried his paint brush and color box.

Last week, in Paris' Musée de la Marine, De Joinville's watercolors of the U.S. Civil War were on public view for the first time. The property of his great-grandnephew, the Count of Paris, the paintings were being exhibited, in an odd reconciliation of historical opposites, under the joint sponsorship of the count—the Bourbon-Orléans pretender—and the retiring President of the Republic, Vincent Auriol. Among the 60 neatly drawn and pleasantly colored watercolors of military life in the U.S. were Fording the River at Bull Run, a sylvan scene of a Union convoy along a quiet road, and an exciting pictorial account, called Pickets Surprised at Peck's House, of a pistol-range fight between Union cavalry and a Confederate outpost in Virginia during the winter of 1861-62.

As a member of McClellan's staff, Prince de Joinville asked for no special privileges and got none. He lived a soldier's life, and his pictures reflect a soldier's-eye view of the war, e.g.. his sketch of General Andrew Porter. De Joinville was chatting with a group of officers one afternoon when he saw the general crossing the parade ground. He whipped out his pencil, captured the pomposity of the potbellied commander astride an equally pompous, arch-necked mount.

Altogether, there were some 100 drawings and watercolors by the versatile prince, showing a firm hand and a fine sense of the dramatic and the satirical. The French press swelled with artistic and patriotic pride. "A great but misunderstood watercolor artist and promoter of our modern navy," glowed one paper. Seven hundred people a day flocked into the Musée de la Marine to see the work of De Joinville. who once remarked: "Everybody writes his memoirs. I have drawn mine."