Édouard Détaille was a familiar figure in belle époque Parisian society; he even turns up at a fictional party given by the Princess de Guermantes in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Puffing on an exotic calabash pipe, he wears the outmoded uniform of a Red Lancer in Napoleon I’s Imperial Guard – during his lifetime the artist acquired an impressive collection of military uniforms, the bulk of which he bequeathed to the Musée de l’Armée in Paris.

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