When Jean Baptiste Isabey made his preliminary sketch for a painting of the Congress of Vienna, he imparted an incongruous air of romanticism to his little group of leading personalities.

As far as posture and gesture can express such things, all is sensibility, passion, youth itself. Since the aging statesmen who ran the Congress were attempting to perpetuate in treaty form something which one can only describe as the foreseeable past, it must be admitted that Isabey had allowed his imagination to run away with him—after all, he had once been Napoleon’s court painter The order which his figures sought to impose was distinctly mechanistic, indeed mechanical—it was as if, with remarkable skill and even some measure of genius, they were engaged in restoring an old broken clock and endowing it with the gift of running backwards. No, they were anything but romantic.

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