The Emperor’s Public Relations Department

This week, my students seemed particularly interested in a painting of Napoleon standing in his study.  This was encouraging.  There are days when I suspect that the most compelling visual aid in a university classroom is the clock above the door.

The painting, by Jacques-Louis David, deserves a little attention.  The clock reads 4:13, the candle is nearly exhausted, and Napoleon looks as though he has been working all night.  Large numbers of papers suggest the labor of government.  Here is the emperor, sacrificing sleep for France—a message that probably went over better than a painting of France sacrificing its sons for the emperor.

Naturally, this is a carefully constructed image, rather than a candid snapshot of Napoleon caught answering his email.  David was selling an idea.  Once students begin looking further for that idea, the furniture becomes evidence, the clothes become arguments, and an apparently innocent clock turns into a government press release.

David was exceptionally good at this.  Across his career, he painted royal commissions, revolutionary martyrs, and imperial magnificence.  Governments changed (sometimes with considerable assistance from a guillotine), but there remained a steady demand for someone who could make the people in charge look as though they belonged there.

Before we accuse modern politicians of inventing image management, we might spend a little time with four of David’s paintings.  Although the technology has improved, the customers would recognize one another immediately.

Start with three Roman brothers who are enthusiastically volunteering for something their relatives plainly wish they would reconsider.

In Oath of the Horatii, the brothers swear to defend Rome against its rival, Alba Longa.  Their father holds up their swords.  Hands reach forward, legs brace against the floor, and everyone on the masculine side of the painting appears to have been assembled with a carpenter’s square.

The women, meanwhile, collapse into curves.  They understand the complications.  The families on the opposing sides are connected through marriage and betrothal, which means that whoever wins, somebody at home will be burying someone she loves.  Military glory has once again neglected to consult the people expected to clean up afterward.

Look at the architecture.  Three arches divide the picture into the brothers, their father, and the grieving family.  The setting is severe, orderly, and conspicuously short of decorative clutter.  Nobody has put a porcelain shepherdess on a side table.  This is a room designed for Duty, with no comfortable chair for Second Thoughts.

The men offer themselves to the state.  The women show us the bill.

We can read the painting as a celebration of patriotic sacrifice, but David has made the cost impossible to miss.  A good classroom question is whether the women weaken the patriotic message or make the sacrifice seem more noble.  Students generally discover that looking at a painting is easier than settling the argument it starts.

There is another trick here:  David gives us the moment before the violence, when everyone can still look splendidly principled.  While an oath is clean, the consequences are messier.  Governments have always preferred recruiting posters to casualty reports, and the distance between those two documents is a fair portion of military history.

Then comes the useful complication: this was a royal commission.  Louis XVI’s government helped sponsor the stern civic morality that later viewers could associate with revolution.  The monarchy was perfectly willing to encourage virtue, apparently assuming that virtue would remain respectful of the monarchy.

That assumption required revision.              

By 1793, David was deeply involved in revolutionary politics.  Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist and David’s political ally, had been murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday.  David gave the Revolution an indelible image of its fallen champion.

He also gave Marat a substantial improvement in public relations.

Marat suffered from a painful skin condition, which helps explain the bath.  David’s painted Marat, however, has remarkably clear skin and an expression of peaceful exhaustion.  This is not the face of an inflammatory journalist whose political writing helped feed the Revolution’s appetite for violence.  This man looks as though he has died trying to finish a thank-you note.

His arm hangs downward and his head falls to one side.  The white cloth, the exposed body, and the wound recall Christian images of the suffering and the dead Christ.  The resemblance does not require every viewer to identify a particular religious painting.  European Catholics had spent centuries learning what a sacred death looked like.  David could draw on that visual education while changing the name of the martyr.

The pen remains in Marat’s hand.  Corday’s knife lies on the floor.  One man writes; someone else kills.  That is a remarkably efficient argument, particularly if you leave out what the man had been writing.

Corday herself is absent.  Her letter is present, helping tell the story of access gained through an appeal to Marat’s sympathy.  The rough wooden box suggests simplicity, while David’s dedication gives it something of the character of a memorial stone.

Almost everything directs us toward compassion.  Almost nothing invites us to examine Marat’s politics.

This is what makes the painting so effective and so useful to teach.  David has not merely shown us a dead man.  He has arranged the evidence so that we feel we already know the man’s moral character.

A political obituary can leave things out.  This one leaves them out beautifully.

Eventually, France acquired Napoleon, who offered David an entirely different opportunity to improve reality.

In Napoleon Crossing the Alps, the future emperor sits on a magnificent rearing horse.  His cloak billows, his hand points forward, and his expression suggests that crossing a mountain range is a minor inconvenience between breakfast and destiny.

The horse appears excited.  Napoleon does not.  That contrast matters.  Here is a man capable of controlling tremendous energy without losing his cool.  The animal provides the horsepower, but the rider supplies the judgment.  You are supposed to imagine that he can manage France the same way…no matter what.

Below him, soldiers struggle with the actual work of moving an army through the mountains.  They are small.  Napoleon is enormous.  Any organization that has ever produced an annual report will understand this arrangement.

Then look at the rocks.  David places Bonaparte’s name alongside Hannibal and Charlemagne, two earlier commanders who had crossed the Alps.  This is a recommendation letter written by history, itself, with David helpfully supplying the signatures.

There is, of course, a small problem.

Napoleon actually made the crossing on a mule.

A mule was sensible transportation for a difficult mountain path.  Sensible transportation, however, is a poor foundation for an equestrian monument.  Nobody looks at a mule and immediately thinks, “There goes the next Caesar!”  Instead, the they wonder whether he remembered the blankets.

The original painting was commissioned by the king of Spain.  Napoleon’s heroic image already had an international market.  David supplied a conqueror who could dominate a wall long before French armies arrived to complicate Spanish enthusiasm.

The mule got him across the mountain but it was the horse that got him into our heads.

Once Napoleon became emperor, mere heroism needed accessories.

David’s enormous coronation painting supplies them: gold, robes, clergy, dignitaries, and enough ceremonial fabric to suggest that the Revolution had principally been a dispute over who got to wear the velvet at the costume party.

Despite the familiar title, Napoleon is shown crowning Joséphine.  He is the person conferring status.  The pope is present, but Napoleon occupies the active center of the ceremony.  Religion supplies solemnity without monopolizing the action.

The laurel crown invokes Rome.  The golden bees on the imperial robes reach back to the Merovingian origins of French monarchy.  The cathedral supplies Christianity.  Napoleon’s regime was young, but its wardrobe had an impressive ancestry.

And there, prominently seated, is his mother.

She did not attend.

David included her anyway.  An absent mother might suggest family disagreement, and family disagreement was not part of the approved imperial composition.  Paint offered a convenient solution.  Most of us have to settle for explaining why somebody missed the wedding; Napoleon could (and did) have the absence corrected.

The whole gathering makes a new dynasty appear established.  You can almost forget that a few years earlier, France had been busy dismantling hereditary privilege, one head at a time.  Now there are new relatives to elevate, new titles to distribute, and new portraits to order.  Apparently, abolishing an aristocracy does not eliminate the demand for one.  It just creates vacancies.

None of this makes David a bad painter.  Quite the reverse:  if the work were clumsy, we could dismiss it without much effort.  His skill is precisely why the argument deserves our attention.

This is why I enjoy using David in class—his paintings give students something concrete to interrogate.  Who gets the light?  Who holds the weapon?  Who is larger than everyone else?  Who has disappeared and who has been added?

Those questions work surprisingly well on contemporary political photographs, too.  We still have flags, carefully selected audiences, rolled-up sleeves, and politicians photographed working late.  We simply require less drying time.

David understood that people remember a convincing image long after they forget the qualifications.  Two centuries later, we still picture Napoleon on that horse.

Somewhere, a mule is entitled to a correction.

The Apartment That Moved Parliament

María del Carmen Abascal wanted to remain in her apartment.  At 87, after more than seven decades in the same Madrid home, she probably thought she had demonstrated sufficient interest in the neighborhood.

Known as Maricarmen, she occupied an apartment in the Ibiza neighborhood of Madrid’s Retiro district.  Cadena SER described it as 90 square meters—about 970 square feet, a reasonably substantial apartment in a desirable part of a major European capital—not a broom closet with a picturesque view of the plumbing.

Her family’s lease dated to 1956.  It had passed from her father to her mother and then to her.  Unfortunately, a family’s attachment to a home and the legal life expectancy of its lease are different things.  The courts concluded that her protected right to inherit the tenancy had ended years earlier, with subsequent occupation continuing through tacit renewals.

The new owner, Urbagestión, wanted a new arrangement.  Maricarmen reported a proposed monthly payment of €1,650.  Her existing payment was roughly €440–€480, although the company said much of that covered community expenses, heating, and water, with the real base rent of only €204.  Her pension was about €1,450.  You don’t have to be a math wizard to see this poses something of a problem.  You cannot spend €1,650 out of €1,450 unless you are a national government.

Before issuing the landlord a black cape and a mustache suitable for twirling, however, consider the other side of the ledger.

At September’s advertised rental levels, apartments in her neighborhood averaged about €26.10 per square meter monthly.  Apply that to the reported 90 square meters, and the result is approximately €2,350.  The broader Retiro district averaged €24, producing a figure of €2,160.  On that basis, the proposed €1,650 was about a quarter to a third below the local benchmarks.  These are rough comparisons, not an appraisal: condition, amenities, and the disputed floor area matter.

Nevertheless, “more than she could afford” and “more than the apartment was worth” are not interchangeable statements.

The company’s stated position was that it had offered a substantial discount from market rent after obtaining a favorable legal ruling.  It also said it owned this apartment, rather than the entire building—a distinction somewhat trampled in the rush to describe the villain.

Why raise the rent? To obtain a larger return from the property.  That is the financial explanation.  I have not seen accounts proving that maintenance, taxes, or financing made precisely €1,650 necessary.  But an owner does not have to be approaching bankruptcy to notice that an asset could earn considerably more.

Conversely, purchasing an occupied apartment is not the same as discovering an elderly tenant unexpectedly growing behind the refrigerator.  The occupancy was part of the investment.

There were legitimate interests on both sides, which made the situation poorly suited to a political meme that would fit a bumper sticker.

On September 23, Maricarmen was evicted.  The sight of an elderly woman being removed from her longtime home supplied the housing crisis with something statistics rarely provide: a sympathetic face.  Thousands demonstrated, and protesters established an encampment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.  The demands soon extended beyond one apartment to stronger protections for tenants generally.

What the protestors probably don’t know is that under Spanish law, Maricarmen’s historic lease agreement, with a monthly rent set at a decades old low rate, expired eight years ago.  During that time, instead of finding a cheaper neighborhood to live in, her lawyers used every possible delaying tactic since, legally, the rent was frozen at the last agreed upon rate until the court case was finally settled.  When the case was finally seen in court, Maricarmen was promptly ordered to leave the building or pay the higher rate.  She chose to remain until the police, armed with a court order, evicted her.

Eventually, negotiations produced an agreement allowing her to return under an eight-year lease, with her payment limited to 30 percent of her net income.  Municipal intermediaries helped arrange it.  The compromise protected her home without requiring everyone to agree about the entire Spanish housing market before handing back the keys.

The national government, however, had a larger set of keys in mind.

On September 29, it adopted emergency housing decrees that included protection against certain evictions of vulnerable households without alternative accommodation through the end of 2030, compensation for affected landlords, and extraordinary lease extensions.  This was not a universal prohibition on evictions, although “qualified suspension subject to eligibility requirements” makes a disappointing protest chant.

The underlying housing problem certainly deserved attention.

Spain is often imagined as the place where northern Europeans go to enjoy sunshine, drink good wine, and spend less money.  The sunshine and supply of wine remains relatively dependable.  The housing bargain requires closer examination.

Spanish housing costs are not uniformly higher than those elsewhere in Europe.  Eurostat’s 2023 comparison placed Spain near the EU average, well below Ireland and Denmark.  But international price comparisons do not pay local wages into local bank accounts.  A rent that looks attractive to someone arriving with a foreign pension can look appalling to someone earning a Spanish salary.

The Bank of Spain has specifically identified the heavy housing burden borne by renters.  National averages blend their experience with that of established homeowners, including people who paid off their mortgages years ago.  Averaging those groups together is rather like calculating the swimming ability of passengers and lifeboats.

Nor is this simply a matter of greedy landlords discovering greed last Tuesday.

The Bank of Spain estimated that new household formation exceeded completed new homes by roughly 400,000–450,000 during 2022–2024.  That does not mean all those households were homeless.  It does mean that substantially more households were competing for accommodation than new construction was providing.

A substantial and growing share of these new households—especially immigrants and young people—enter the rental market rather than buying.  In contrast, only about 90,000–100,000 new homes are completed annually, and the number of purpose-built rental (Build-to-Rent) apartments is far smaller, typically in the low tens of thousands at most.

This creates an annual shortfall of around 130,000–160,000 housing units overall, with an even tighter gap in the rental segment.  The cumulative deficit since the early 2020s is estimated at roughly 750,000 homes and could exceed one million by 2028 if construction does not accelerate sharply.  The imbalance is concentrated in high-demand areas such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and the Mediterranean coast, and it continues to push up rents while shrinking the stock of available long-term rental apartments. 

The European Commission points to obstacles including construction labor shortages, development delays, and insufficient development-ready land.  Spain also has a small social rental sector: roughly 1.5–1.7 percent of households, compared with about 6–7 percent across the EU.  Meanwhile, Spanish home prices rose 12.7 percent in 2025 and will likely continue to rise sharply.  There is plenty of demand and a decidedly inadequate supply of affordable alternatives.

Into this situation comes rent control, carrying a clipboard and promising to magically improve the arithmetic.

Spain limits certain annual rent increases and permits additional restrictions on new leases in officially designated high-pressure areas.  These are not identical rules imposed on every apartment throughout the country.  The distinction matters, although it does require politicians to use more than six words.

Rent controls can help the tenant who already has a covered apartment.  The difficulty is for the person still looking for one.

If a regulation reduces the expected return from offering a rental, some owners may sell, pursue another permitted use, or decide that becoming a landlord is an ambition best left unrealized.  Developers considering rental housing make similar calculations.  The strength of that effect depends on the rules, exemptions, costs, and other incentives; it is not proof that every rent restriction stops every construction project.

Still, the government ordering a lower price does not magically create more apartments.  Building apartments is the result of a business decision and if the government eliminates the chance of profits, that decision is never going to be positive.

Catalonia’s figures show moderation in registered rents under its controls.  Preliminary research also suggests a reduction in new tenancy agreements, although the researcher acknowledges limitations.  Both outcomes can occur together: better terms for some tenants and fewer opportunities for others.

A sensible policy must therefore answer two questions: how to keep vulnerable people housed today and how to provide enough homes tomorrow.  Answering the first by ignoring the second is how a temporary emergency acquires commemorative anniversaries.

Meanwhile, Maricarmen had her agreement, the demonstrators had forced national attention, and the government had announced a ban on evictions until 2030.

There was just one remaining, niggling detail.

Today, on October 2, the Spanish Parliament rejected the eviction bans.  Several small political parties banded together and supplied the opposition necessary to defeat the eviction bar.  Among the objections was the argument that the measures would further discourage rental supply.

The promised protection through 2030 had failed its parliamentary vote three days after its announcement.

Maricarmen’s eight-year agreement suddenly looked considerably more durable than the government’s solution.

Maricarmen has a lease.  It was the government policy that had a short-term rental.

This is a victory for one elderly woman in Madrid.  Her landlord, Urbagestión obviously figured out that the bad publicity was more expensive that the loss of a single apartment’s rent.  In the long run, Urbagestión is a winner, too.

But across Spain, the companies that build rental units have carefully watched all of this and have concluded that the cost of construction has just gone up again. 

The Cobra Effect

How to Get More Cobras: A Practical Guide to Government Incentives

Some years ago, the British government in India supposedly discovered that Delhi had too many cobras.  This was a reasonable conclusion.  One cobra in the pantry is probably too many, particularly if you are reaching behind the flour sack in search of the baking powder.

The British decided to solve the problem with the one tool governments have always trusted: other people’s money.  They announced that anyone delivering a dead cobra would receive a cash bounty.

At first, the plan worked splendidly.  Dead cobras arrived by the basketful.  Some official in Delhi undoubtedly prepared a lengthy report in triplicate announcing that the Cobra Reduction Initiative had exceeded expectations and recommending that everyone involved receive a promotion.

Then the locals began breeding cobras.

This was not the outcome the British had intended, but it was the outcome they had purchased.  The government was paying for dead cobras, and the most efficient way to obtain dead cobras was no longer wandering around in the weeds hoping to meet one.  It was raising them at home.

Eventually, the authorities discovered the cobra farms and canceled the bounty.  The breeders, now stuck with cages full of poisonous merchandise for which there was no longer a government market, released the snakes.  Delhi supposedly ended up with more cobras than it had before.

This is known as the cobra effect: an economic policy designed to solve a problem creates an incentive that makes the problem worse.

It is a wonderful story.  It may not be true.  But we shouldn’t let that bother us too much—a hell of a lot of the things we believe aren’t real.  We can take solace in the fact that the principle described is all too real.

The British really did pay bounties for cobras, but historians have found no solid contemporary evidence of a great Delhi cobra-breeding industry.  An 1887 inquiry by the Bombay Natural History Society concluded that breeding large numbers of cobras in captivity for bounties was highly improbable.  The elaborate tale about the cobra farms and the mass release of snakes appears to have grown in the retelling.

That is unfortunate because economics seldom supplies us with a story containing bureaucrats, poisonous snakes, entrepreneurial villagers, and a conclusion suitable for printing on a coffee mug.

Fortunately, the French stepped in with rats.

The Great Hanoi Rat Enterprise

In 1902, the French colonial government in Hanoi became alarmed about the city’s rat population.  Rats carried plague, crawled through the new sewer system, and generally behaved like rats.  The French therefore offered a bounty for every rat killed.

Officials did not want thousands of dead rats piled on their desks, which was understandable.  They required people to turn in only the rat’s tail as proof of death.

Somewhere in Hanoi, a fellow looked at a rat, looked at a pair of shears, and founded an industry.

Soon, French officials began noticing healthy rats running through the city sans tails.  The rat catchers had realized that killing a rat eliminated a productive asset.  Cutting off its tail, collecting the bounty, and releasing it allowed the animal to breed more rats, each equipped at birth with another government check attached to its rear end.

There were also reports of rats being brought into Hanoi and of people deliberately raising them.  The French had wanted fewer rats.  They had accidentally established a municipal rat-farming program.

Unlike the Delhi cobra story, the Hanoi rat hunt is well-documented.  So, if strict historical accuracy concerns you, call it the rat effect.  Unfortunately, that sounds less like an economic principle and more like a discussion about Congress.

People Respond to Incentives, Not Speeches

The cobra effect rests upon one of the simplest principles in economics: people respond to incentives.

They do not necessarily respond to what officials intended, what the regulation’s preamble says, or what was written on the PowerPoint slide at the committee meeting.  They respond to what gets them paid, promoted, fined, fired, or left alone.

The government wanted fewer cobras, but it paid for carcasses.  The French wanted fewer rats, but they paid for tails.  In both cases, officials confused the thing they could count with the result they actually wanted.

This happens regularly because the real objective is usually difficult to measure.

A school wants educated students, but education is hard to measure, so it rewards test scores.  Teachers naturally spend more time teaching what appears on the test.  In extreme cases, weak students are encouraged to stay home on examination day, or someone quietly improves their answer sheets afterward.  The scores rise, the superintendent holds a press conference, and the children remain about as educated as they were on Monday.

A bank wants profitable, satisfied customers, but customer satisfaction is hard to enter on a spreadsheet.  The bank therefore rewards employees for opening accounts.  Wells Fargo employees, crushed beneath aggressive sales quotas, opened millions of accounts customers had not requested.  Management asked for more accounts and received more accounts.  The fact that many were fraudulent was apparently an unnecessary detail omitted from the quarterly report.

Hospitals want patients treated promptly, but that is complicated.  Administrators therefore measure waiting times.  At some Veterans Affairs facilities, employees manipulated appointment dates and scheduling records so the official waiting times looked shorter.  The veteran was still sitting at home waiting for an appointment, but the computer was feeling much better.

This is the great comfort of modern administration.  If reality refuses to improve, there is usually a number somewhere that can be adjusted.

That is the essence of the cobra effect. It is not an argument that government action, regulation, or incentives never work. It is an argument that good intentions are not a substitute for understanding how people will respond.

When a Fine Becomes a Fee

The cobra effect does not always require fraud.  Sometimes perfectly respectable people make the situation worse simply by behaving rationally.

Economists once studied Israeli day-care centers where some parents habitually arrived late to collect their children.  The centers introduced a fine, expecting parents to become more punctual.

Late pickups increased.

Before the fine, parents who arrived late felt guilty because they were inconveniencing the staff.  After the fine, they no longer viewed lateness as inconsiderate.  It had become a service available for purchase.

“I am not keeping the teacher late,” the parent could reason.  “I am buying twenty minutes of additional childcare.”

The fine did not forbid the behavior.  It established a market price.

Even after the fine was removed, lateness remained elevated.  The old social obligation had been destroyed.  Once you convert shame into a financial transaction, it can be difficult to get the shame back.

This is worth remembering whenever someone proposes a small fine for objectionable behavior.  If the fine is lower than the value of committing the offense, it may function as a license.

A wealthy man does not necessarily see a $25 parking ticket as punishment.  He may see it as valet parking provided by the city.

Mexico City Solves Pollution by Selling More Cars

Mexico City once attempted to reduce air pollution by prohibiting cars from operating one weekday according to the last digit of their license plates.

The theory was that people would use public transportation, share rides, or remain home contemplating the environmental damage caused by their selfishness.

Many families bought a second car with a different license number.

Since poorer families could not afford a shiny new second automobile, they often purchased an older, dirtier one.  The policy intended to reduce driving encouraged additional automobile ownership.  Studies found no convincing improvement in air quality.

This is what happens when policymakers assume that human beings will stand quietly where they have been placed.  Human beings instead go around the rule, under it, through it, or down to a used-car lot.

The regulation applied to a particular license plate.  It did not apply to the trip the driver still wanted to make.

Carbon Credits With a Tail Attached

The same problem has appeared in environmental policy.

HFC-23 is an extraordinarily powerful greenhouse gas produced as a byproduct of manufacturing another chemical.  Carbon-credit programs paid factories to destroy HFC-23 rather than release it into the atmosphere.

Destroying the gas was beneficial.  The difficulty was that the credits could become extremely valuable.  A factory might earn more from destroying the waste than from selling the original product.

At that point, producing the chemical created more waste, and more waste created more credits.  A program intended to eliminate a pollutant risked making pollutant production profitable.

This is the cobra effect wearing a laboratory coat.

Whenever the government pays people to dispose of something, it ought to ask whether somebody will begin manufacturing it.  If Washington offered $100 for every broken toaster, the country would soon contain forty-seven new toaster factories, all producing defective appliances with patriotic efficiency.

The Difference Between a Target and a Goal

Economists often connect the cobra effect with Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

A measurement can tell us something useful until people have a reason to manipulate it.

The number of arrests may once have indicated police activity.  Attach promotions to arrest totals, and officers may concentrate on easy, minor arrests rather than serious crimes.

The number of academic publications may once have suggested scholarly productivity.  Make careers depend upon publication, and professors divide one useful article into six smaller ones, establish journals nobody reads, and produce research proving that additional research is urgently needed.

The number has not become false.  It has become useless.

This does not require wicked people.  Ordinary people adjust to the rules placed before them.  If you reward quantity, they produce quantity.  If you reward speed, they sacrifice quality.  If you punish reported mistakes, they stop reporting mistakes.

Then management announces that errors have fallen to zero.

How Not to Breed Cobras

Avoiding the cobra effect requires asking a question rarely heard at government meetings:  How could a reasonably clever scoundrel take advantage of this?

Better yet, invite several reasonably clever scoundrels into the planning meeting.  They aren’t hard to find, every organization already employs a few.  They know where the weaknesses are.

Policymakers should measure genuine outcomes rather than convenient activities.  They should examine what happens outside the measured category.  They should conduct small trials before launching enormous programs.  They should use independent audits, limit rewards, and plan what happens when the program ends.

Most importantly, they should stop assuming that citizens, employees, businesses, teachers, doctors, and rat catchers will respond as obedient figures in an economic diagram.

They will respond to the actual incentives.

The cobra effect is not an argument that government should never act, that regulations never work, or that every public employee is hiding a cage of snakes behind his desk.  Markets create perverse incentives too, as Wells Fargo demonstrated with considerable enthusiasm.

It is an argument for humility.

Good intentions are pleasant things.  They look handsome in speeches, fit comfortably into campaign literature, and require no particular knowledge of economics.  But good intentions do not repeal human behavior.

Before adopting any bounty, subsidy, quota, fine, or performance target, we should ask what intelligent people will do when they pursue it literally and selfishly.  Can they collect the reward without solving the problem? Can they hide the problem, rename it, move it somewhere else, or manufacture more of it?

If so, the policy may not eliminate the cobras.  It may merely teach people how to raise them for profit.

John Singer Sargent Goes to War

From Madame X to Mustard Gas

John Singer Sargent made his fortune painting people who possessed titles, country houses, substantial bank accounts, and enough wall space to hang a portrait the size of a garage door.  If you were an Anglo-American aristocrat and wanted your descendants to believe that you had better posture, finer clothes, and more character than you actually possessed, Sargent was your man.

He painted Madame X, the Wyndham sisters, the daughters of Edward Darley Boit, and a considerable portion of the English-speaking upper crust.  He could make silk shimmer, jewelry sparkle, and could make an otherwise ordinary duke look as though he had been entrusted with the future of Western civilization.  Sometimes all this required was a good suit, dramatic lighting, and a very large canvas.

Yet late in his career, this painter of wealth and refinement produced one of the most haunting images of the First World War.  Instead of duchesses in satin, he painted British soldiers in muddy uniforms.  Instead of confident faces, he showed eyes covered with bandages.  Instead of portraying people who owned half of Yorkshire, he painted men who could not see well enough to walk without placing a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead of them.

The painting was Gassed, and it remains one of the most powerful pictures of modern war ever made.

Sargent was American, at least technically.  He had been born in Florence, in 1856, to American parents, and he grew up wandering around Europe.  Sargent trained in Paris and eventually settled in London.  He spoke several languages and lived the sort of international existence that makes filling out the nationality box on government forms needlessly complicated.  By the beginning of the twentieth century, he was probably the most successful society portraitist in the English-speaking world.

Around 1907, however, he tried to escape the portrait business.  Painting the affluent had made him wealthy, but it had also required him to spend decades listening politely while rich people explained how they wished to be painted.  He increasingly preferred landscapes, watercolors, and his enormous mural projects for the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts.  He never entirely abandoned portraiture, but he tried to replace lengthy oil commissions with quicker charcoal drawings.  Even a genius eventually discovers the advantages of getting the customer out of the studio before lunch. 

The First World War made his retreat into pleasant watercolor landscapes rather difficult.

The conflict struck Sargent’s family directly.  His niece Rose-Marie Ormond had married the French art historian Robert André-Michel, who was killed while serving in the French Army in 1914.  Rose-Marie then worked as a nurse caring for blinded soldiers.  On Good Friday, March 29, 1918, she attended services at the Church of Saint-Gervais in Paris.  A shell fired by the German Paris Gun struck the church, collapsing part of the roof and killing her, along with scores of other worshippers.

Thus, by 1918, the war was not merely something Sargent read about in the newspaper.  It had reached into his own family, as the war had reached into nearly every family in Europe.

That May, the British War Memorials Committee, working under the Ministry of Information, asked Sargent to produce a monumental painting for a proposed Hall of Remembrance.  The government envisioned a grand national collection filled with enormous works commemorating the war.  It was an ambitious project (which is another way of saying that a government committee had conceived something expensive without being entirely certain where it would go or how it would be paid for).

The proposed painting was to be about twenty feet wide and show British and American troops cooperating in the war.  Sargent was a logical choice.  He was an American who had lived for decades in Britain, and he was already famous on both sides of the Atlantic.  Prime Minister David Lloyd George personally urged him to accept, telling him that he would be performing “a work of great and lasting service to the nation.”

This was a little more persuasive than the usual request to paint somebody’s wife beside a decorative column, so Sargent agreed.

In July 1918, at the age of sixty-two, he crossed to France with Henry Tonks, a painter, physician, and former surgeon.  They spent time with the Guards Division near Arras and later visited American forces near Ypres.  Sargent began looking for his great scene of Anglo-American cooperation.

Unfortunately, modern warfare refused to pose for him.

Traditional battle paintings required massed soldiers, charging cavalry, fluttering flags, heroic commanders, and preferably someone pointing dramatically toward the enemy.  The Western Front provided concealed machine guns, scattered artillery positions, men hiding in holes, and long stretches of apparently empty landscape.  The closer one approached the fighting, the fewer people one could actually see.  Anyone who stood around in a picturesque group was likely to attract artillery fire, which generally discourages picturesque posing.

Sargent complained that the Ministry wanted an epic, but the front would not supply the necessary crowds.  British and American troops were not conveniently assembling together on hilltops so that a visiting artist could arrange them into a twenty-foot composition.  General Pershing also resisted placing American soldiers under permanent British command, apparently without considering how much this inconvenienced Sargent.

The painter nevertheless produced a remarkable group of watercolors and sketches: ruined streets, damaged buildings, soldiers bathing, troops resting, crashed aircraft, and the devastated landscape around Arras.  What he still lacked was the single great subject that could support a canvas of the enormous size demanded by the committee.

He found it on August 21, 1918.

Sargent and Tonks learned that large numbers of gas casualties were arriving at a corps dressing station at Le Bac-du-Sud, on the road between Arras and Doullens.  When they reached the station, they saw hundreds of British soldiers suffering from mustard-gas exposure.  The men arrived in small processions, their eyes covered with lint and bandages.  Because they could not see, each placed a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead while an orderly led them toward treatment.

They sat or collapsed on the grass while still more casualties arrived.

It was a beautiful evening.  The sun was setting.

The combination was almost unbearable: golden light, green grass, exhausted men, and a weapon designed to burn the eyes, skin, and lungs.  Sargent began sketching immediately. 

Mustard gas had first appeared on the Western Front in 1917.  Despite the name, it had nothing to do with mustard, hot dogs, or anything else likely to improve a picnic.  It was a persistent chemical agent that could remain on the ground, clothing, and equipment.  Symptoms might not appear immediately.  Then came blistered skin, damaged lungs, vomiting, and temporary or permanent blindness.  It did not have to kill a man to remove him from battle.  It could also contaminate the soldiers who carried him and overwhelm the medical system responsible for treating him.

The scene at Le Bac-du-Sud gave Sargent his subject.  The committee allowed him to abandon the original plan for a cheerful Anglo-American tableau, which was fortunate because nothing says bureaucratic desperation quite like trying to turn an international command dispute into decorative art.

Back in his Fulham studio, Sargent spent the winter of 1918–1919 transforming his sketches into Gassed.  The finished canvas measures a little over seven and a half feet high and twenty feet wide.  It is not so much a painting as a section of wall with an opinion.

Across its center, a procession of nearly life-size soldiers moves from left to right along a duckboard path.  Their eyes are bandaged.  Each man reaches for the shoulder or equipment of the soldier ahead.  One raises his foot d awkwardly, unable to see where the board lies beneath him.  Orderlies guide the procession while other casualties sit, sprawl, or retch on the ground.

The arrangement resembles a classical frieze or a religious procession.  It also recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Parable of the Blind, although Sargent’s soldiers are not foolish men tumbling into a ditch.  They are capable men rendered helpless by an invisible weapon.  Their dependence upon one another is both practical and symbolic.  Let go of the man ahead, and you are lost.

Then, in the background, Sargent painted a football match.

Apparently, the British Army could stage a football game within sight of the Apocalypse, provided someone produced a ball.

The game is not a joke, however.  It is one of the picture’s most disturbing details.  In the foreground, blinded men stumble toward medical treatment.  In the distance, other soldiers continue playing.  War does not stop and arrange itself into a single emotion.  Agony, boredom, recreation, death, paperwork, tea, and football can all occur within the same field of vision.

For decades, viewers also interpreted the painting’s yellow-green cast as Sargent’s deliberate attempt to suggest poison hanging in the air.  That was a reasonable interpretation, but it turned out to be partly wrong.  During a major restoration completed in 2023, conservators removed thick, yellowed varnish applied during the 1970s.  Beneath it they discovered a brighter palette of pinks, mauves, and greens.  The poisonous haze owed rather more to old varnish than to Sargent.  The 1970s had managed to make the First World War even browner than it already was.  

Sargent completed Gassed in March 1919.  It appeared at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and was voted the picture of the year.  Winston Churchill praised its “brilliant genius and painful significance.” Other viewers considered it too heroic, too sentimental, or too patriotic.  Virginia Woolf, who was not easily impressed by large patriotic gestures (or possibly tended to be unimpressed by anything that attracted an enthusiastic crowd), disliked it.

The Hall of Remembrance for which the painting had been commissioned was never built.  The project disappeared into the familiar postwar mixture of financial trouble, changed plans, and administrative rearrangement.  This may have been the first time—but it was certainly not the last—that a government commissioned the contents before deciding whether it could afford the building.

The painting eventually was placed in the Imperial War Museum, where it became one of the museum’s best-known works.

Sargent later painted General Officers of World War I, completed in 1922, which presents twenty-two senior British and Imperial commanders standing together in solemn formality.  They look rather like the faculty of a very expensive military college, assembling for a meeting at which everyone believes he should be department chairman.

The contrast with Gassed could hardly be greater.  One painting gives us famous men, polished boots, decorations, rank, and authority.  The other gives us anonymous soldiers who cannot see.  One shows those who directed the war.  The other shows what the war did to the men who fought it.

Yet Gassed is not a simple attack upon generals, governments, or war.  Sargent was not producing an anti-war manifesto and he did not turn the casualties into grotesque symbols.  He gave them dignity, but he did not make them triumphant.  Their courage consists largely of continuing to place one foot in front of the other.

That restraint is part of the painting’s strength.

Sargent remained what he had always been: a painter of observed people, physical presence, atmosphere, fabric, light, and gesture.  He used the traditional language of monumental figure painting because it was the language he knew.

The surprise is how well that language accommodated something so thoroughly modern and horrible.

Sargent had spent much of his career painting privilege.  He understood how clothing, posture, setting, and scale could give importance to a human figure.  In Gassed, he applied those same abilities to ordinary soldiers whose names we do not know.  He gave them the scale once reserved for monarchs, aristocrats, and conquering heroes.

But these men have conquered nothing.  They cannot even see the next step.

John Singer Sargent died in 1925.  The Hall of Remembrance vanished before it was built, the generals in his later portrait passed into history, and the drawing rooms that made him famous became museum exhibits and tourist attractions.  Gassed survived them all and today it is a central part of the Great War exhibit of the Imperial War Museum.

Its power comes from the collision between beauty and horror.  The sunset is beautiful.  The arrangement of figures is beautiful.  The handling of light is beautiful.  What is happening to the men is not.

That tension keeps the painting from becoming mere propaganda or being merely an illustration of suffering.  It records a moment when civilization’s crowning achievements—chemistry, industry, organization, transportation, medicine, and art—were met on the same patch of ground.  Some of those talents had been used to blind the soldiers.  Others were being used to lead them to safety.  Sargent used his to make certain that we would still see them after they could no longer see for themselves.