Gallic horsemen

Évariste Vital Luminais was an academic painter specialising in scenes from early French history, notably the period stretching from pre-Christian Gaul to the early Middle Ages. This watercolour relates to his paintings of marauding Gauls from the 1870s, but it appears not to have been worked up into a finished oil. Although watercolour was practised with increasing regularity in France during the 19th century, artists took to the medium in significantly fewer numbers compared to their British counterparts. French artists tended to use watercolour for preparatory work and study, rather than for finished works of art.