Smoke, thunder, and the white horse of a victorious emperor — Horace Vernet's monumental Battle of Friedland, here reproduced in a rich sepia halftone on card no. 138 of the Lévy et Neurdein Réunis LL Versailles series, freezes the electric moment of 4 June 1807 when Napoleon's army shattered the Russian forces, effectively ending the War of the Fourth Coalition and clearing the path to the Treaties of Tilsit. Vernet, himself the son and grandson of painters, had a journalist's eye for the chaos of battle — fallen gun carriages, wounded men, the press of infantry in the middle distance — and yet always anchored the composition on Napoleon, mounted and commanding, an island of calm in the carnage. This unused card, with its deeply impressed halftone screen and warm card stock, is a fine example of the art-postcard boom that swept Edwardian Europe, when museum masterpieces reached mass audiences for the first time through the postal system.