Pictures at an Exhibition

This is a self-portrait in pastel of my great grandmother, Ada Gilbey. She died while giving birth to my great-aunt, aged thirty. Like many Victorian ladies she was a competent artist.

Another is Elizabeth Thompson who painted herself aged twenty-three. She went on to become a professional artist, married to Sir William Butler, and is better known as Lady Butler. Some of her work is on show at the National Army Museum in Myth and Reality: Military Art in the Age of Queen Victoria.

“Charting almost a century of military art, the exhibition gives prominence to paintings and sketches by Lady Butler, the leading female battle artist of the age. Her guiding principle of painting not for the ‘glory of war’ but to portray its ‘pathos and heroism’ demonstrates the stylistic development that can be seen through the works on display.” (National Army Museum)

Her pictures are usually in oil and are on a big scale. She first came to public notice and acclaim in 1874 when Queen Victoria bought The Roll Call depicting a muster of the survivors in the Grenadier Guards after a battle in the Crimea. It is 36 x 72 inches, oil on canvas, but more pertinently, she was painting from her imagination although she read a lot, interviewed participants and could see printed illustrations. Additionally for the first time there were photographs. Roger Fenton spent four months in the Crimea and took 350 photographs, making him the first war photographer.

Here she shows the Scots Greys on the morning of Waterloo after a miserable, wet night. Two mounted trumpeters sound the reveille. It is the soldiers who dominate not the officers. There had been heavy rain and thunderstorms during the night causing Napoleon to delay engaging with the Allies until midday to give the ground a chance to dry out. This was a deciding factor as it gave the Prussians time to arrive but I digress. Her pictures do not often come on the market but this was bought by the Shropshire Military Museum for about $450,000 at Bonhams in 2021.

Here she paints exhausted horses in the Royal Horse Artillery collapsing in the Peninsular War during the retreat to Corunna in the winter of 1808 – 1809. It is such a convincing portrayal she was unable to sell it. I mean, wounded soldiers are acceptable but suffering horses something else. It is not in the NAM exhibition but there is another picture on the same theme. Not all her pictures were historical. She was commissioned by Queen Victoria to paint this the year after it happened.

Here she went to great lengths to achieve authenticity. “ I was counselled to give Her Majesty the description of every figure. She knew all by name, for I had managed to show all the Victoria Crosses. Majors Chard and Bromhead were sufficiently recognisable in the centre, for I had them both sit for their portraits. I had the fight acted by the men who took part in it, dressed in the uniforms they wore on that awful night. Of course, the result was that I reproduced the event as nearly to the life as possible but from the soldiers’ point of view.”

I do not often buy books about artists, too many go unread, but I have ordered  this.