Siège de Sébastopol, assaut du 18 juin 1855, 4 heures du matin

This painting by Alphonse de Neuville, dated 1859, depicts the Siege of Sevastopol and more specifically the assault of 18 June 1855 at 4 a.m. The scene shows a battlefield saturated with smoke, fire, churned earth, and bodies, where soldiers advance and fire amid almost continuous chaos. The artist emphasizes the collective violence of the assault, the intermingling of combatants, the confusion of the ground, and the immediate human cost of battle, with dead and wounded scattered across the foreground. Exhibited at the Salon of 1859, the work belongs to the visual memory of the Crimean War and to the nineteenth-century taste for major contemporary military scenes, treated with dramatic intensity and a sense of tragic heroism.