Octave Penguilly L'Haridon

After retiring from active military service, in 1854 he was appointed as curator of the Musée de l'Artillerie in Paris, a position he retained for many years.

In 1859 he showed at the Salon a landscape entitled Les Petites mouettes ("Little Gulls") (1858, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes), depicting a bleak rocky inlet on Belle Île.

[3] The picture was praised by Maxime du Camp and Charles Baudelaire, who referred to the sense of the uncanny, as though the rocks make "a portal open to infinity...a wound of white birds, and the solitude!

The elaborate frieze-like composition portrays the Combat of the Thirty a famous episode in medieval chivalry during the Breton War of Succession.

He chose to reform traditional religious iconography in his painting Les bergers, conduits par l'étoile, se rendent à Bethléem, depicting the shepherds led by the star to travel to Bethlehem (1863, Musée d'Orsay).