The Battle of Nancy

The Battle of Nancy (La Bataille de Nancy) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Eugène Delacroix, signed and dated 1831, showing the death of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, at the Battle of Nancy in 1477; it is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy.

The picture was Delacroix's first official commission. It grew out of King Charles X's stay in Nancy in 1828, and the city's Société royale des sciences, lettres et arts put forward three possible subjects: the battle itself, Lorraine's victory over the Burgundians, or the finding of Charles the Bold's body. Delacroix took the first. He never went to Nancy to prepare it, relying instead on preparatory drawings of medieval weapons and costume, topographical surveys supplied by Baron Schwiter, and literature such as Walter Scott's novel Anne of Geierstein.

The scene is the last episode of the war between Burgundy and Lorraine. On 5 January 1477 Charles the Bold, who wanted to annex Lorraine, was killed by the lance of the knight Claude de Bauzémont. Delacroix put the duke in the left foreground, his face showing fear as the lance comes at him, with Bauzémont gripping the weapon nearby, while René II of Lorraine looks on from his horse at the right. The centre contains no key figure, only fallen men and dying horses. The colours are mostly cold and the whole canvas fairly dark, with the pale ground and sky lighting the scene and the main faces kept clear.

The canvas measures 237 by 356 cm. It was probably still unfinished when Delacroix left for Morocco and Spain in 1832; the museum records it as a gift of the State in 1833, and when it was shown at the Salon of 1834 critics judged it untrue to history. Ownership passed from the State to the city in 2008. The image has been reused as cover art, for example on the 1994 American edition of Gérard Chaliand's anthology The Art of War in World History.