During his early career, when Napoleon Bonaparte was in power, he began depicting the French soldier in a more familiar, vernacular manner rather than in an idealized, Davidian fashion; he was just twenty when he exhibited the Taking of an Entrenched Camp[1] Some other of his paintings that represent French soldiers in a more direct, less idealizing style, include Dog of the Regiment, Trumpeter's Horse, and Death of Poniatowski.

He gained recognition during the Bourbon Restoration for a series of battle paintings commissioned by the duc d'Orleans, the future King Louis-Philippe.

King Louis-Philippe was one of his most prolific patrons,[3] and the whole of the Constantine room at the Palace of Versailles was decorated by him, in the short space of three years.

One well known and possibly apocryphal anecdote maintains that when Vernet was asked to remove a certain obnoxious general from one of his paintings, he replied, "I am a painter of history, sire, and I will not violate the truth", hence demonstrating his fidelity to representing war.

[7] His nephew Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, also a painter and his pupil, wrote Voyage d'Horace Vernet en Orient (2 volumes, 1844).