General Chanzy, Steel Engraving by E. Crickmore, Mackenzie, London, circa 1872

This steel engraved portrait shows General Alfred Chanzy (1823 to 1883) in profile to the left, wearing a braided kepi, a dark uniform tunic with heavy fringed epaulettes and the cross of the Legion of Honor on his breast. His sharply waxed mustache and pointed imperial give the face a striking silhouette against the dark, softly graded background.

The plate is lettered "Engraved by E. Crickmore from a Photograph." immediately below the image, with the name "CHANZY." in widely spaced open capitals beneath it, and at the foot the imprint "William Mackenzie, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow." Mackenzie was one of the great Victorian subscription publishers, and in the years following the war of 1870 and 1871 he issued illustrated histories of the conflict with portraits of its leading commanders, engraved on steel after photographs.

Chanzy was the most tenacious French commander of the second half of that war. After the fall of the Second Empire he took command of the Army of the Loire and fought a long series of actions around Orléans and Le Mans through the winter of 1870, keeping a French army in the field when much of the country had been overrun. He was afterwards Governor General of Algeria from 1873 to 1879 and French ambassador to Russia, and he was widely seen as a possible President of the Republic before his sudden death in 1883.

The engraver has translated the photograph into a fine mesh of lines, so that the polish of the buttons, the gold braid of the cap and the texture of the epaulettes all read clearly. Portraits of the commanders of 1870 are sought by collectors of French military history and of the Franco Prussian War, and this one would sit well in a study or library alongside other military portraits of the period.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.