The Dawn of Waterloo by Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), 1846-1933. 1895. Oil on canvas. Collection and image credit: National Army Museum, accession no. NAM. 2021-12-1-1-1. Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund and the NAM Development Trust, and identified as being out of copyright. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Although this was painted in a makeshift studio in Aldershot, after the family's return from her husband's service in Egypt in the early 1890s, it had its origins much further back than that. Travelling with her family in Europe at the end of her teens, she visited Waterloo on her nineteenth birthday in 1865. The visit made a deep and lasting impression on her:

The day was most enjoyable, but what an inexpressibly sad feeling was mixed with my pleasure; what thoughts came crowding into my mind on that awful field, smiling in the sunshine, and how, even now, my whole mind is overshadowed with sadness as I think of those slaughtered legions, dead half a century ago, lying in heaps of mouldering bones under that undulating plain. [31]

This painting is a foreshadowing of that wretched outcome, as the soldiers rise from their uneasy slumber to what, for many of them, would be their last day. The battleground was just ten miles from Quatre Bas, the scene of her highly successful painting of 1875, The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras. The events at Waterloo had never ceased to inspire her. As she said herself, looking back, before the war broke out in 1914 the Battle of Waterloo "had always loomed large to me, as it were from the very summit of military history" (37).

Even the Great War itself could not shake the hold of Waterloo on Butler's imagination. In her Autobiography, she realises this, and sees why: "We see through its blood-red veil of smoke Napoleon fall. There never will be a fall like that again: it is he who makes Waterloo colossal" (37).

In fact, this lingering hold on the imagination was not unusual for 1890s. Paul Usherwood and Jenny Spencer-Smith note that during the decade "there was an increasing tendency for British battle painters to take their subjects from past campaigns, such as the Peninsular War of 1808-14, the Waterloo campaign or the Crimean War of 1854-56," and add that two other artists, Andrew Carrick Gow (1848-1920) and Ernest Crofts (1847-1911), both showed paintings at at the Royal Academy which illustrated "events from the Napoleonic Wars" (101). The painting itself was briefly explained in Royal Academy Notes as depicting "The 'Reveille' in the bivouac of the Scots Greys on the morning of the battle. The foreground group is composed chiefly of officers, in whom the regiment lost heavily that day. Part of the line of the horses is shown picketed to the left, and beyond is the bivouac of the 1st Royal Dragoons" (23). All are being given the signal, by the two buglers in the background, to rise, cast off the blankets under which they have slept, reach for their swords, leave the embers of the fire which had been lit in the centre foreground, and prepare for their deadly encounter with Napoleon's troops.

Closer view of the central part of the painting.

The historical context of this dim, atmospheric scene is, indeed, tragic. So much of the regiment would be cruelly sacrificed "for British military supremacy," as Joseph A. Kestner puts it (209). According to the National Army Museum, "[t]he regiment suffered a terrible loss of life that day - of 416 men of the regiment who went into battle, 102 died and a further 97 were wounded." The poignancy of the scene must have been felt by the artist all the more during her preliminary sketches at the family home in Wicklow, in Ireland, before her husband's posting to Aldershot, when her models were local Irishmen. But she had much sympathy for the Scots themselves, and found their scarlet and tartan uniforms, glimpsed here in the early morning light, particularly appealing.

Links to Related Material

Bibliography

Blackburn, Henry, ed. Academy Notes, Issues 20-22. Royal Academy, 1893-1896. See 1895, Gallery XI. Google Books. Free ebook.

Butler, Elizabeth. An Autobiography. London: Constable, 1922. Internet Archive, from a copy in Robarts Library, University of Toronto. Web. 29 November 2024.

"Dawn of Waterloo." The "Reveille" in the bivouac of the Scots Greys on the morning of the battle, 1815. National Army Museum. Web. 29 November 2024.

Kestner, Joseph A. Masculinities in Victorian Painting. Aldershot, Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1995.

The Royal Scots Greys (2nd Dragoons). National Army Museum. Web. 29 November 2024.

Usherwood, Paul and Jenny Spencer-Smith. Lady Butler, Battle Artist, 1846-1933. Gloucester: Sutton and the National Army Museum, 1987.


Created 29 December 2024